ERM or Enterprise Release Management is needed now more than ever for salesforce.com implementations. With the growth and sophistication of the force.com platform, more and more enterprise customers will look to sfdc for their business solutions. With that, comes more complex projects, more custom force.com development and integration, and better change management and code migration processes. Use of sfdc sandboxes for development and testing will be more crucial than ever and migrating these configurations and customizations from sandbox to sandbox and ultimately to a production org will require more precision and accuracy than ever before.
Having worked on a large enterprise sfdc customer with more than 15 sandboxes – I know all the pains of having to migrate config and code from environment to environment. There is no 100% perfect tool or solution; instead a mix of automation tools and business process is required,
Look for ERM and migration/deployment to be a key area of the product roadmap from both salesforce.com and AppExchange partners. Additionally, factor in resources and time for deployment activities in any complex salesforce.com implementations.
Tags: appexchange, eclipse, erm, salesforce.com
