Question

I am looking quickly move changes between Salesforce Production & Sandbox. Is there any way we can know the difference between two environments i.e How many workflows, objects, email templates are modified/added in compared view.

I know we can use outbound change set but its tedious job of moving the changes and not feasible when Production is continuously being updated.

Answer 1

After speaking with the experts at two Dreamforce conferences I find the only way to get a description of an instance is to use the force.com IDE, as suggested by LaceySnr. I’ve learned a couple techniques that help.

First, I no longer even attempt to use change sets. These are time consuming to build, have no clarity as to what is really inside and sometimes just won’t work.

Second, I keep at least two force.com IDE projects for each instance (test,production). The first project has everything (check everything in the metadata component). The second project is tiny and only has the components I want to work on.

The first project is checked into some change control system; CVS, SVN, Git, Mercurial, etc. Your choice. Using the differencing tools on this project let’s you compare change sets.

But it is nearly impossible to develop using the first project because it takes too long for force.com to process even the smallest change. This is because it processes the entire project whenever any change is made. So, make all the code changes in the smaller project.

Then look at the ANT build tools http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/apexcode/Content/apex_deploying_ant.htm to automate the migration of changes from the smaller to larger project.