Being a consultant is hard. You are constantly working and juggling deliverables on multiple projects while getting interrupted all the time. You have told us that your normal workday includes estimating level of effort; getting stuff done; generating status reports; and writing code all while farming prospects. Oof! Just writing all that makes me tired. If this is what a life of a consultant is about, I can understand why you want more automation as well as more streamlined and less manual processes.
The latest release of Snapshot (2.0) is designed to help you do more, do less and do nothing. Let me explain:
Do more
90% of execution is in the planning. Snapshot 2.0 is designed to help you understand the changes, collate change matrices and lists, and help deploy faster and easier. Snapshot empowers you to:
- Compare metadata to identify differences using the Compare Assets feature
- Schedule a Metadata Differences report to notify you when changes occur
- Deploy faster using Deploy Assets feature which lets you auto-create job lists and tracks/reports deployments.
You can also expand your service offerings (and thus your audience) by including security services by sending out notification:
- For security breaches using Security Health Check report
- When sensitive events happen using the User Activity Timeline report – Imagine getting notified when an admin deletes an Object or exports a sensitive report!
Do less
I love updating documentation… said no one! Yes, it is universally accepted as a necessity but would you rather work on spending time on acquiring more customers or update Org documentation. Especially when it can be automated – enter our Data Dictionary report. It can help you document the state of an Org – all Objects, Fields, their properties, org Limits and where they are being used. Use it for project level of effort estimation, administrator reference documentation, end of project documentation, SOX/ HIPPA/ FDIC/ ITIL/ GDPR compliance documentation.
By the way, Snapshot also can provide optimization reports like Field Usage, Picklist Usage, Last Activity Date (to optimize Reports, Dashboards, Email Templates), Apex Code Coverage etc. as well. Focus on what drives you, not on what you need to drag on.
Do nothing
Here is a scenario that we have all gone through: A colleague updates a shared Org and forgot to update you. Now, _you_ get to reconcile the changes after the deployment window began. That was fun when it happened last week, wasn’t it? How about never going through that again? And no, you don’t have to do anything to achieve that. Let Snapshot do the work.
Schedule Snapshot to take regular backups of your shared Org(s). Then, schedule Compare Time Series reports on a New Snapshot trigger that is emailed to you. Boom! You do nothing after that but you are always in the know!
By the way, this scheduling is available for all reports. In other words, you can do the same for comparing multiple Orgs (staging vs production Orgs, production vs production, whatever), running Data Dictionaries, configuring Security Health Check or Apex Code Coverage reports etc as well. All without you having to lift a finger. How is that for a “Do nothing” feature?
Bottom line: We love our system integrators. We want them to do lots of high impact tasks and let us handle all the repetitive tasks. After all, automation is what Snapshot is all about.
Contact us to learn more.
Congratulations! 