Use Sandboxes to Manage Change

Learning Objectives

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

Use sandboxes for training.
Test a release in your sandbox.
Recall one option for deploying changes from a sandbox to production.

Putting Your Sandboxes to Work

Now that you know how to set up sandboxes,you can learn why you need these helpful tools in the first place.

Sandboxes are the best place to test many things. You can use them the most for training, testing releases, and creating or adding new features before releasing them to production.

Remember that you can log in to your sandboxes by going to https://test.salesforce.com.

Use your username with a period and the name of the sandbox at the end—like gorav@example.com.AppTesting—and your password on the day the sandbox was created.

Use Sandboxes for Training

Good training is important for NPSP and Salesforce adoption.

When you train your users, it's important to follow the old coaching advice and practice like you play, and get your uses involved in as real a training environment as possible. If real-world data is important for training, use a Partial Copy or Full sandbox.

Otherwise, you can load sample data into a Developer or Developer Pro sandbox. Read How I Solved This: Populating Sandboxes with Flow for an example of how a group of awesome admins made a tool to seed a Developer sandbox with test data.

Use Sandboxes to Test Releases

You also use a sandbox to preview and test features included in new Salesforce and NPSP releases before they’re deployed to production orgs.

Here’s when you can start testing:

New NPSP features are released to all sandboxes about a week before release to production begins.
Salesforce platform release previews start about four to six weeks before a release to production begins.

For Salesforce platform releases, make sure you have at least one preview sandbox for the entire preview period. How do you make sure one of your sandboxes is a preview sandbox? It’s all about timing.

The Salesforce Sandbox Preview Guide linked in Resources can help you set your timeline and determine if your sandbox is preview-ready. And be sure to check out the Release Readiness Strategies module on Trailhead for more details.

Some features in each NPSP and Salesforce platform release are enabled automatically. For others, you can choose to enable and use them. After the previews are in your sandbox, here’s what to do in either case:

For a feature that'll be enabled automatically, try the new feature and determine if you need to train or inform your users before a release.
For a feature you choose to turn on, decide if you want to enable it, learn how to turn it on, and practice configuring it.

With release preparation in your sandbox, you’ll be ready for release day no matter what new features arrive.

Use Sandboxes to Deploy Changes to Production

Sandboxes are also the perfect place to create your own new objects, apps, and other features. The best part? You can take most of those new elements and deploy them right to your production org.

There are a few ways to do this, but we won’t review them all here. One important tool we want to mention, though, are change sets. Change sets allow you to deploy modifications to a sandbox made in the Setup menu—like adding a new object or app, but not data—to production with clicks instead of code.

To learn about all of the options for getting your hard work from your sandbox to your production org, check out Deploy Your Changes in Salesforce Help. You’ll find instructions for using change sets and be able to learn about other code-focused tools. And if you get stuck, you can always turn to the NPSP community for help.

In the next unit, we’ll talk about that community and how you can contribute to it.

Time Estimate

Topics

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Nonprofit Cloud Resources

Use Sandboxes to Manage Change

Learning Objectives

Putting Your Sandboxes to Work

Use Sandboxes for Training

Use Sandboxes to Test Releases

Use Sandboxes to Deploy Changes to Production

Resources