Often, when it comes to implementing changes in Salesforce, it isn’t until you have to make one that you discover breakdowns and bottlenecks that keeps your team from performing optimally. Prodly AppOps is all about enabling you through an easy-to-use UI that is built to empower admins and keep your team supported by sound governance, effective change management, and give you the data that helps you use your resources wisely.

Here are just a few of the benefits of employing AppOps to create a proactive team:

#1: Improved change management

From applying a governance framework to set strategic objectives for your instance to optimizing the change request and delivery process, AppOps supports you in improving your workflows based on reliable data. Starting with your strategic approach to change management, AppOps seeks to simplify the process of change with a bias towards declarative changes that keeps admins in the driver’s seat of handling appropriate requests. 

#2: Time savings

Frequent silos and exhausted project timelines cost your team more than just money and productivity. AppOps closes the gap in your governance strategy by automating the deployment process for your Salesforce administrators. This can save hours or even days of time wasted during the release cycle. Do your team the favor of harnessing an agile approach to Salesforce changes with AppOps.

#3: Improved quality assurance

Are you set up to handle quality assurance properly? How about handling automatic regression testing and rollbacks seamlessly? When you’re working with change requests from your users, you need a tool that’s going to support your team in ensuring that every request is fulfilled properly, from intake to completion. 

#4: Reliable auditability

Auditability is perhaps the most important part of working with customer requests and maintaining the health of your Salesforce org. Without it, it would be difficult to track whether a process is working effectively, whether resources are being used to the best of their ability or if there needs to be a complete system overhaul. AppOps Release gives you the ability to track every change so you can go back and see exactly who changed what and when. AppOps places the auditing process at the crux of how you control and manage your change workflows.

#5: Sandbox optimization

Is your company using your Salesforce sandboxes to its full capacity? Most companies aren’t. With AppOps you can refresh painlessly and seamlessly keep your sandboxes in sync with production. You can also reduce the frequency and impact of bugs and errors in your production orgs. AppOps gives you the power to use your sandboxes effectively as well as create a reliable connection between your data and your team.

#6: Reduced data errors

The frustration of duplicate data and missing object relationships when manually deploying Salesforce records between orgs is immeasurable against the satisfaction of working with AppOps. AppOps is unique in being able to provide this level of reliability, efficiency and flexibility. This is a tool that’s designed with all of the possibilities, for your team in mind, with the reliability and data-based efficiency known for results. 

#7: Increased throughput of changes

As your team’s usage of Salesforce grows, so should your tools for managing those changes. The low-code shift has given business analysts, project managers, and business operations managers the power to drive changes and improve processes right alongside Salesforce administrators and developers. The clicks-not-code approach of AppOps means increasing the velocity and pace of releases. With AppOps, anyone on the team can be a part of the change management process while still following best practices for governance. 

#8: Happier users

The point of strategic governance is to bring a more quality product to your end user. Implementing AppOps means that your end user gets changes faster. Your Salesforce admins will have much less busy work and move through their project timelines more efficiently. Your developers will also appreciate being more challenged with projects that fall within their skill set. AppOps is all about ensuring deployments that occur correctly every time, while allowing your team to optimize building, testing, and delivering the next release.

#9: Problems are handled more proactively

Instead of being a reactive team, AppOps empowers you to move toward proactive methodologies that help you eliminate wasteful processes and optimize those that work well. Doing the work in the beginning helps to reduce the chances of silos and bottlenecks that could have been avoided with proper planning, and by automating repetitive tasks in the release process. 

#10: Eliminate ineffective silos

Without software to support, track, and monitor the status and progress of customer requests and other projects your team handles, it is common for there to be serious breakdowns in communication. This leads to silos and backups that leaves your team loaded with unfinished projects and saddles efficiency. AppOps gives everyone the ability to safely make Salesforce improvements within the defined change processes. Treat your team to the next level of change management, the low-code option that empowers admins and strengthens IT team’s strategic leadership.

Managing low-code platforms with low-code tools is the trend for IT teams looking to increase efficiency and deliver quality changes to end users faster. The foundation of your Salesforce change management strategy should be backed by a tool that addresses each project independently to assess the path through production. Interested in taking Prodly AppOps for a test drive? Schedule a demo today.

Remember the cellphone you had in 2014? How high tech did it feel? How smart was it? Did it make your previous phone look like something from a time capsule?

At the time, it’s likely that it felt cutting edge, and you couldn’t imagine anything better. It’s also why you most likely gave it a pass for lacking features that are standard today.

But compare that phone to the phone you have now. Is it still up to date? Is it still the best way for you to make calls, texts, watch TikTok, and all the other things a phone can do? Or is it missing some key features?

What about other innovations in tech? Are there technologies that didn’t make the improvements phones did in the last decade? Have we gotten used to some level of stagnation in our tech?

DevOps for Salesforce

About a decade ago, DevOps emerged as a potential way to manage Salesforce. DevOps apps attempted to bring the core concepts of DevOps — CI/CD, version control, automated code promotion — to the Salesforce platform. It promised to give developers the ability to manage Salesforce like software. Yet, it would still be years before DevOps tools would gain real traction with Salesforce customers because Salesforce is a “clicks, not code” platform primarily managed by admins not developers.

As we look through some of the key evaluation points of DevOps tools for Salesforce, it feels like things are a bit stale. In the years since the creation of the DevOps for Salesforce, is this the best we can do? Why are there still rigid configurations and bottlenecked developer-lead deployments? Why are admins, business analysts, and project managers excluded from the conversation because they don’t have the same level of experience with DevOps? Where is DevOps for 2021?

Low-Code DevOps for Salesforce

Salesforce gives anyone the ability to build powerful solutions with a couple of clicks, but these solutions are no good if you can’t get them into production. Unfortunately, with traditional DevOps solutions you can only complete Salesforce change requests as fast as your developer team can work, which creates a bottleneck in your release cycle. What’s more, wasting expensive developer hours on Salesforce configurations that could easily be made by less technical users if given the right tools and guardrails really adds up.

To unblock the release process and empower more people to innovate on the platform, we need to change how we think about DevOps for Salesforce. It’s time for a new set of rules:

1. Time to Value is Everything

Every industry is undergoing a digital transformation, and companies are rushing to meet changing customer expectations faster than their competitors. Like any new tool, implementation time is a large factor of success. Salesforce teams with growing backlogs cannot afford to waste months implementing a tool. They must be able to begin running deployments and tests within days, or even hours.

2. Easy Enough for Even an End User

DevOps makes it easier to manage Salesforce workflows. But code-heavy DevOps tools are complicated, and inaccessible to most Salesforce administrators let alone business users. It’s not realistic to expect non-developers to use a command-line interface or navigate a version control system. Instead DevOps tools should be designed with the least technical user in mind with an intuitive, point-and-click UI that enables the whole team to manage their workflows directly within Salesforce.

3. Must Work Out of the Box

Every customer tailors Salesforce to their unique needs and business processes. Just as you wouldn’t buy an eSignature tool that would require you to completely redesign your sales process, you shouldn’t have to upend your existing processes or make changes to your data schema to use a DevOps tool. Your DevOps solution should fit you, not the other way around.

4. Flexibility is the Key to Agility

The types of solutions built with Salesforce are endless, so rigid tools just won’t cut it. A DevOps tool needs to work for your process today, and as your team grows. As your process becomes more fine-tuned, so must your DevOps. Don’t settle for a tool that forces users to go through the same rigid and heavy-duty process regardless of the size or nature of the update. DevOps should work to deploy your changes how you want, not force you to use their rigid process every time.

5. It Has to Scale

Speed is the name of the game, and repetitive, manual tasks cost valuable time. What good is automating a process if it can’t be reused? Salesforce teams can save time by determining the data and metadata to deploy once and then reuse, copy, and tweak the template. And as you customize Salesforce with new apps and functionality, your DevOps tool must be smart enough to understand the underlying schema changes and keep everything in sync. Another note to consider as your team scales is that the easier it is for end-users to make changes, the more efficiently your DevOps can scale as well.

AppOps: Next Gen DevOps for Salesforce

No one is using a phone from 2014 anymore. So why settle for a DevOps tool from the past? Prodly AppOps is DevOps built for today. AppOps removes the rigidity and clunkiness of traditional DevOps solutions to help teams be more efficient and self-sustaining and support you as you grow. A low-code solution for managing Salesforce changes, AppOps is easy enough for even end users to use, but powerful enough for the most sophisticated developer needs. In exchange, your team gets more power to make Salesforce work harder for them.

How many in-person, industry-related events have you been to over the past two years? I think there are some of you who will respond with one, or two. What I’m really expecting most of you to be thinking is, “I haven’t been to an in-person event in what feels like forever…but I really want to attend one and reconnect with people!”

For me it’s actually been five! One way back at the end of February, 2020, and the other four since October, 2021. And let me tell you something - it truly is great to be able to visit with people in person again. And it doesn’t really matter if that’s at an organized event, or even just your daily work life moving back to an in-office setting. There’s just something about the in-person experience that Zoom, Google Meet, Hopin, or all the other event platforms and apps have yet to successfully recreate. It is what I like to call the “random collision” - that feeling you get when you run into someone you haven’t seen in a long time, and perhaps you didn’t even know they were going to be where you are at that moment.

Do You Have Time for a Coffee?

If there’s one good thing that has come about since the beginning of the Covid-19 era, I think it’s that people generally place more value on face-to-face interactions. We used to take those for granted, but now we cherish those moments and look forward to them taking place again and again. “Oh my goodness, <insert any one’s name>! I didn’t know you were attending <insert an event or meeting name>! Let’s catch up over a drink!”  … Or a meal, a walk around the block, a leisurely stroll through a shopping mall - it doesn’t really matter what, let's simply have a conversation where we both aren’t staring into a computer screen.

Get Your Coffee Brewing

So why is now the perfect time to plan your Community Events strategy? Here’s my top 3 reasons for attending Community Events:

1. Connections: To meet people I know through the Salesforce Community, but haven’t yet met in person yet. Think of the online community as your starting point to building relationships and in-person events as the cement that helps create a strong foundation for building your personal community. 

2. Education: In-person Community events often have some of the best and brightest people presenting on highly relevant and timely topics such as how to deal with Salesforce deprecating Workflow Rules and Process Builder.

3. Apps: In-person Community events always have sponsors showing off their products in an expo hall. One of the greatest things about event sponsors and expo halls is the ability to see apps in action...to discover a solution to a problem you might not even have realized exists for your company.

Mogli & Community Events

Mogli is proud to join the ranks of the awesome companies sponsoring Cactusforce. MoglisSMS is the most robust and user-friendly native text messaging solution on the AppExchange. But why should you use text messaging? How about 98% open rate & a 45% response rate? That’s a metric email just can't come close to. 

Whether you are attending Cactusforce in person, or virtually, please join us at our 602 Talk on Friday, January 21, 2022, 10:50 AM 11:00 AM MT (Arizona) to learn more about how SMS can benefit your organization and your customers. Not attending Cactusforce? Don’t worry, you’ll find Mogli at other great Community Events like Higher Ed Dreamin’, Northeast Dreamin’, Texas Dreamin’ & more, throughout the year. Can’t wait for the next event to see Mogli? Get your demo now! 

Eric Dreshfield

Product Evangelist & Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame

The Salesforce environment is no longer the sole domain of one person or one team. The clicks, not code movement has expanded the responsibility of platform configurations, app development plans, and releases of new features or capabilities across the business.

Why is release management support essential for low-code app success, no matter which methodology you choose?

As the premiere DevOps for Salesforce solution, Prodly is excited heading to Phoenix, Arizona for the Salesforce Event of the Southwest in the Phoenix area, Cactusforce!  

After over two years away from in-person Salesforce events, we are excited to be able to see so many of you face to face, and even more of you virtually.  We are eager to be back to share with you our Next Gen DevOps for Salesforce to help you better manage your low-code Salesforce Apps.

Prodly enables Salesforce teams to increase productivity 65-80% while reducing risk up to 30% by putting next-generation DevOps into the hands of admins and citizen developers. By reimagining the change management experience, Prodly’s AppOps suite delivers greater business agility and governance without straining IT. With solutions for release management automation, version control, sandbox seeding, data migration, and regression testing, Prodly AppOps sets the standard for low-code DevOps and can be implemented 20 times faster than traditional applications. 

Prodly powers change management workflows for high-growth and Fortune 100 companies, including Cardinal Health, Nutanix, Johnson & Johnson, Splunk, and Verizon. The company is privately-held and based in Palo Alto, California with global operations. For more information, visit prodly.co, or if you are in person at Cactusforce, stop by our booth to see how Next Gen DevOps for Salesforce can help you improve your Salesforce Change Management.

Prodly AppOps - Next Gen DevOps for Salesforce

Now admins and developers alike can quickly and efficiently deploy, configure and test Salesforce data.