Source Control in Salesforce - Admins and Elephants should never forget

Source Control in Salesforce - (because only Elephants never forget)

Can you remember all of the changes you've made in your Salesforce ORG over the past week?

What about the past month?

Unless you have a photographic memory or an elephant-like memory, chances are some of those individual fields, reports, classes or custom settings you diligently worked on in the past would now be difficult to recall.

Keeping it logged

Keeping track of everything that's changing in your ORG becomes an ever bigger challenge when you've got multiple administrators or developers working on the same project.

Faced with this challenge, a few months ago I started looking into Source Control within Salesforce and started to use ANT (I blogged about it on Salesforce Ben). Once it was all set up, I found that tools like this can be a huge help.

A new tool in town

I've recently been working with a brand new tool from BlueCanvas which looks really promising and wanted to share some of its features with you.

The tool integrates into Git and adds a much nicer visual on top of it. Crucially it is still using Git in the background so more advanced users of their tool will be able to use all of their favourite current Git shortcuts.

ORG Compare

Easily compare difference betweens orgs, for example, a Production and Sandbox or 2 different Developer instances. I find this really handy to quickly confirm whether 2 developer ORGs on a project are currently synchronised or not. 

The comparison is really easy, just choose your first ORG as a the source, and then select another to compare it against. The differences then load up in the page below.

BlueCanvas comparison feature

Activity View
See who has done what in your ORG.

This is really useful for anyone working in teams. I've often used this feature to find out easily who was last working on some code if I have any questions about it.

BlueCanvas activity view

The homepage of the Blue Canvas management tool allows you to connect all of your development, UAT, and production organisations to one tool using a standard salesforce logon screen.

Once connected, you can easily jump between multiple ORGs using drop down menus.

The BlueCanvas management homepage

Coming soon

The next version of the tool will allow you to make deployments directly within the tool. This will be a huge time saver for anyone that regularly has to keep multiple ORGs synchronised as part of a project and I'm really looking forward to trying that feature out when it's released.

Try it out

The new tool from BlueCanvas is now available in Beta form. Just visit their website and request a Beta account if you'd like to try out their tool as well.

Blue Canvas
https://bluecanvas.io/


Image from Pexels, Artist Pixaby