Successforce Blog
People are talking about the Salesforce Sandbox
As you’ve probably noticed by now, we enjoy talking about our features and getting the word out about our latest innovations. One of the innovations that I’m particularly fond of is the Salesforce Sandbox. Once our customers start using it, they tell us they can’t imagine living without it.
What I’ve found interesting is the sheer number of creative ways that our customers have been utilizing it. Some exciting examples are:
- Shortening their integration and CRM deployment times
- Protecting their live operating environments during testing
- Experimenting with new AppExchange applications – exploring new areas of functionality
- Training new users in a safe environment that exactly mimics their production deployment
- Trying out extensive customizations without any fear of making a mistake that would impact productivity of their end users
- And many others…
But what we’re particularly excited to see is when the press and analysts talk to our customers and validate what we’ve been saying. The folks over at Nucleus Research did just that and have recently written an article on the benefits of Salesforce Sandbox.
If you're curious about what they found after speaking with customers and doing their own research, feel free to download the article.
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I think the sandbox is over hyped and over priced, in my personal opinion. We use the sandbox right now because we have a major migration going on. So we're migrating a lot of customer data but did we "NEED" Sandbox to do this.
We could of done sample testing with the Dev environment however we would miss those data anomalies that always shows up. So I agree with the fact you would need this area for this type of migration, however I think the price of that is ridiculous. What other company charges you for a test environment?
As for downloading and testing applications… let's be real. Salesforce does a great job where you can put an application in development mode so only admins or those selected profiles can see the app. You don't need a Sandbox for that!
Shorten project cycle time… agreed. Again, what other company charges for a dev instance?
Bottom line… Unless you're doing migrations/integrations leave sandbox to the bigger kids.
Posted by: Fifedog | July 07, 2006 at 11:33 AM
Fifedog,
Thanks for your post!
My personal opinion is that it really depends on the situation as to whether the cost outweighs the value. Where your needs might be more focused on migration, other customers might see a lot of value in some of the pieces that are less important to you. I think the proof is in the pudding in this case: Salesforce Sandbox is being used by both small and large customers to accomplish a wide variety of complex tasks that otherwise would not be possible without a production grade replicated environment.
I've spoken with numerous customers who really love the fact that they can try out massive sharing rule changes - without risking exposing sensitive data to live users. Or the customers that find it critical to have a refreshable non-production training environment. Or to test extensive integrations over long periods of time with large amounts of data. Or even using Sandbox as a snapshot of the entire database for archiving purposes.
As for the cost, we do include Salesforce Sandbox in the Unlimited Edition for no additional fee. We also offer it as an add-on in the Enterprise Edition. Some customers will not have the need to justify the cost - but for those happy customers that this solved mission critical problems (like the customers mentioned in the Nucleus Research article), it's well worth the price.
At the end of the day, we can agree to disagree - and I'm glad to hear that it's helping you out with your migration project!
-Jager
Posted by: Jager McConnell | July 07, 2006 at 05:04 PM
Hi Jager,
I agree with you about the importance of the Sandbox tool - if you want to reengineer your lead assignment rules or other unique areas, there's no other good way to test.
However, that to me makes this one of the biggest weaknesses of the SFdc tool, and I think bunches of members of the community were hoping the Sandbox would alleviate that issue, as you say by providing a (near- would be fine) production-grade replicated environment. To see it have such a high price tag, and out of range of many IT budgets, feels like salt in the wound. I've cringed each time I've had a Sandbox conversation with a client, knowing that when I tell them the price, they'll go through the roof.
It really seems to discourage a big factor in the SDLC best practices that Salesforce is otherwise great at encouraging...
Posted by: Chris | July 08, 2006 at 04:08 PM