DEVOPSdigest

Gearset announced a suite of new features to expand the capabilities of its comprehensive Salesforce DevOps platform.

Archiving, expansions to Compare & Deploy, and Flow Navigator provide enterprises with new data optimization and visibility tools to ensure fast and reliable release management. The introduction of these features follows the launch of Long Term Projects in Pipelines – a first-to-market functionality integrated into the Gearset CI/CD Pipelines solution that allows teams to deliver parallel digital transformation initiatives quickly and securely in one release pipeline.

"For DevOps strategies to be effective, teams must trust that data is accurate and consistent to deploy applications at the pace of innovation," said Matt Dickens, CPO and Co-Founder of Gearset. "Gearset's newest features empower teams to visualize, manage, and apply relevant and necessary data throughout the development cycle in real-time. This enables organizations to navigate constant changes to run, transform, and grow their business on Salesforce confidently."

Kevin Boyle, CEO and Co-Founder of Gearset, added: "The new Gearset features are the direct result of customer feedback and the experience and expertise of our team in scaling Salesforce deployments. Each new feature is designed to help eliminate developmental delays, last-minute surprises, and production halts, accelerating the path to application advances that drive business value."

■ Archiving: As a core component of comprehensive data lifecycle management, Gearset Archiving gives teams control of their Salesforce data storage, joining the existing backup, sandbox seeding, and monitoring solutions on one platform. Storing data in Salesforce drives up costs and can negatively impact performance and compliance reporting. Gearset Archiving empowers teams to remove obsolete data from Salesforce orgs, reducing storage costs and preventing performance degradation.

Organizations can now customize archiving rules to automatically reduce data storage in Salesforce, which improves search, reporting, and calculation processes. This allows teams to safely retain legacy data in their archive and restore records individually or in bulk at any time. With policy-based archiving, organizations can ensure compliance with data protection and privacy regulations, only deleting data once retention policy limits have been met. Organizations also benefit from managing Archiving in one platform alongside Gearset's backup and data management solutions.

■ Compare & Deploy Upgrades: Keeping metadata clean and consistent across enterprise organizations is vital to improving deployment success. However, many Salesforce deployment tools don't compare metadata across source and target organizations when deploying. Thus, teams typically lack the visibility required to avoid manual changes before completing a deployment. Building on the platform's widely adopted existing workflow and filtering capabilities, Gearset Compare & Deploy features a new design that makes it even faster and more intuitive to set up comparisons and identity changes across organizations.

DevOps teams can granularly analyze and compare metadata across organizations at an even faster pace, alerting teams to inconsistencies earlier in the deployment process. This makes identifying and fixing potential issues easier, eliminating deployment failures.

With the updates to Gearset Compare & Deploy, DevOps teams can now:

- Select items to compare and deploy even faster

- Benefit from on-demand metadata retrieval to enable real-time comparisons, without the need for significant pre-configuration

- Refresh specific metadata types without re-comparing the entire Salesforce org

■ Flow Navigator: Gearset's Flow Navigator is the industry's first solution to visualize changes made to Salesforce Flows. Flows allow Salesforce teams to automate business processes, giving administrators and low-code developers the tools to build business logic. However, Flows can be difficult to build and manage, especially when pinpointing what changes have been made and the status of the Flow. As a result, there was a real market need for a solution that visualizes metadata changes for Flow deployments.

Gearset Flow Navigator enables teams to see any unexpected differences and have full visibility into the impact of proposed changes before deployment. More specifically, Flow Navigator addresses challenges often faced by teams in managing the comparison and deployment of different Flow versions in their orgs.