How to Deploy from a Salesforce Sandbox

You’ve tested your configurations and apps in your Salesforce Sandbox, but how do you deploy changes into production once they are ready? There are several critical steps to take that will protect your live customer data and workflow after you have completed your Salesforce Sandbox testing and are ready to go live. 

Licensing

It is important to remember that licensing is totally different in Sandbox. Especially for Salesforce AppExchange apps like Chargent, in a Salesforce Sandbox there are no user licenses to assign, because sandboxes are set with a site license.

All features are also active normally in a sandbox, whereas in production there may be features which have not been enabled or licensed.

TIP: test in production once you have installed your apps and deployed your change sets to production. Make sure that any licensing and user assignment is in place, and that you have assigned user licenses to the users who will need them.

Permissions

Login as a User (not just Admin!)

When you are the Salesforce Administrator, you can normally see all or most data in Salesforce, and modify most everything too.

Your users in Salesforce will have much lower visibility and access — very different read, write, and edit permissions!

As part of your testing changes deployed from Sandbox to Production, be sure to log in as different users with different permissions in your production org. Validate that changes made in Sandbox are working correctly for each user type in production.

Go to Setup > Users and click “Login” next to the name of a user, to log in as them. Then make sure you can see and do everything you expect!

TIP: If you don’t see the Login link next to your users’ names, you might need to contact Salesforce support to enable this feature — it isn’t always there, especially if you upgraded from Salesforce Professional Edition.

Communities Permissions

Along the same lines, logging into Salesforce Communities as an end-user before go-live is particularly critical. There are several permissions that need to be enabled to expose Salesforce data to the end users in a community. They will be drastically different than for any named Salesforce user, and especially different than a Salesforce Administrator!

So a best practice is to open a new web browser or incognito mode, and log in using credentials for one of your end users in the new community, before you launch. This is the best way to make sure that everything is configured correctly, and that your users have access to the data and functionality required in the community (and no access to anything they shouldn’t have).

How to Deploy

For an app like Chargent, you will need to install the app directly into Production. Installed packages (what Salesforce AppExchange apps are) are not copied from Sandbox configurations.

Chargent can be installed from our web site using the Package Installation Manager, which selects the correct pieces of your Chargent setup.

You can migrate configuration changes from your sandbox to production using Salesforce Change Sets. Change Sets are a convenient way to move configuration changes from one Salesforce org to another, and only includes changes you make under the Setup menu in Salesforce. No record data is included.

Once you have installed Chargent in production, and migrated the configuration from your Salesforce Sandbox, it’s time to test some more.

Make sure you test with end users as described above, test a few live payments to make sure that part is set up correctly for Chargent, and do a final run through of any user requirements.

Accept Salesforce Payments with Chargent

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