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Migrate into Production

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

  • Test a migrated sandbox.
  • Request permission to migrate your production org.
  • Migrate production org.
  • Train the team.

Test in Your Sandbox

Maria’s sandbox looks great as far as she can tell, but that’s not enough. She wants to do a thorough real-world test. So she recruits Ursa Major’s top service agent, Ada Balewa, to help her out.

Ada is excited to help her team switch to Knowledge Lightning. Maria carefully explains the differences between Knowledge in Salesforce Classic and Lightning Knowledge. Then Ada tests the sandbox to make sure that the org looks and works the way she’s used to. The more thorough the testing, the more confident you’ll be when you do the final migration.

Ask for Permission

When Ada gives the migrated sandbox the thumbs up, Maria’s ready to run the migration in Ursa Major’s production org. Maria sends a request to Salesforce support requesting that they enable the production org for migration to Lightning Knowledge. This process takes a week, so Maria is glad that she included the time in her schedule.

The support team steps Maria through a list of questions to make sure that she’s ready.

  • Has Maria read the Lightning Knowledge Migration documentation?
  • Does she understand the limitations of Lightning Knowledge and that she can’t go back after migrating?
  • Does she know the complexity of the org she plans to migrate? For example, the number of article types, articles, versions, file fields, translations, and article feeds.
  • Does she have a detailed plan for her migration, including field mapping and updating customizations, such as Apex and Visualforce?
  • Is her schedule accurate?
  • Did she use a full-copy sandbox for her test migration?
  • Did she verify and test the metadata and data in her sandbox?
  • Will she refresh the sandbox just before starting her production migration?

Maria answers yes to all their questions. She shows them her plan, her lists, and the notes she made during her sandbox migration. Salesforce support is impressed by how prepared she is. They agree that she’s ready and enable her production org for migration.

Refresh the Sandbox

Before she starts her migration, Maria refreshes her full copy sandbox. Now she has a backup before she does the production migration. She’ll use the refreshed sandbox to compare to her production org after migration to make sure that the new org is perfect.

Migrate to the Production Org

Maria goes through all the same steps for her production org that she did for her sandbox org.

  1. Pre-migration tasks: She updates her existing checklist with lessons learned during her sandbox migration. Then she steps through each item in her checklist. Last of all, she disables actions so no one can change the org during migration.
  2. Migrate: She schedules migration for an off-peak time, starts up the Lightning Knowledge Migration Tool, and steps through it just like she did for her sandbox migration. It’s easier this time, because she worked out the kinks and documented her plan during her sandbox migration. After the migration is over, she validates the results and accepts the migration.
  3. Post-migration tasks: Consulting her notes from the sandbox migration, she sets up her production org. She performs basic setup, customizes her new Knowledge object, updates code, creates permissions, and tests the Lightning version of her app from AppExchange. She refers to her sandbox, copying over changed code and customizations into her production org. She makes sure that everything matches.
  4. Test: Finally, she tests her various scenarios carefully to check her work.

Because of her careful planning, her migrated org works perfectly. Her production org is now using Lightning Knowledge. But she’s not quite done yet.

Notify and Train the Team

Maria’s team is already using Lightning Experience in the rest of their org, so they don’t need much training. Maria hands training duties off to Ada, since she trained Ada before Ada started testing.

Ada rolls out Lightning Knowledge to two separate groups. After migration, her team members can always switch between Knowledge in the Classic interface and Knowledge in the newly updated Lightning Experience. Until they’re trained, everyone uses the Classic user interface. As part of training, Ada has the first group switch to Lightning Experience. Then she trains them on the new features. The next day, she repeats this process for the second group.

Ursa Major is now fully migrated to Lightning Knowledge! Are you ready to do the same?

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