What is Salesforce Org Management, Anyway?

At Metazoa we talk a lot about Salesforce org management and how tools like Metazoa Snapshot make life easier for Salesforce professionals. However, for those just getting started on their Salesforce journey, there is often confusion as to what org management really is. Luckily, we have the answer for you!

First, it’s essential to know what a Salesforce org is. An org is simply your specific organization’s data and metadata that resides on a Salesforce instance – also known as a server. Your org (or orgs) can share the same instance as hundreds of other orgs, but they don’t share your organization’s data. The good news is Salesforce does an amazing job of keeping all that data separate and secure.

One of the key benefits of this “cloud stack” methodology is that multiple environments within Salesforce are much easier to manage, maintain and secure. This is a big reason Salesforce has seamless upgrades, no scaling and standardized components/applications. This allows customers to focus on their orgs without the worry of everything else. If you’ve ever witnessed the development of cloud applications from scratch, you’ll understand and appreciate the beauty of this system.

Now that you know what an org is, the next thing you need to understand is your organization’s Salesforcean org strategy. In other words, how many different Salesforce orgs do you have in your company? Most organizations use either a single org or multi-org strategy. The bigger the business, the more complex this becomes.

As the name implies, a single org strategy is simply putting all your data, processes and business functionality in one Salesforce org. A few of the big advantages to this strategy are cross-business unit collaboration, shared solutions for common business processes and the ability to share data where appropriate. From a technology standpoint, integration with other systems is much easier to accomplish with a single org strategy. However, Snapshot, takes much of the pain out of multi-org strategies.

The downside to a single org strategy is that org complexity can become a barrier to progress. Because you’re managing many lines of business with different data visibility requirements, org-wide settings like security and sharing could become difficult to govern and manage. Also, time to market and the ability to innovate quickly could be impacted by a number of teams rolling out new functionality concurrently. And there is a greater potential to hit specific org limits, such as the number of custom tabs, objects, and lines of code.

Given these obstacles, you may think that a multi-org strategy is a “no-brainer” for your company. That’s because there are some great advantages for a multi-org strategy, including the fact that org-wide settings are easier to govern and manage, and there is less chance of exceeding org limits. The most important advantage to having a multi-org strategy is improved time to market and freedom to innovate and agility.

However, there are some downsides… Multi-org strategies with no strategic vision can result in a lack of collaboration, major reporting and integration issues, and a ton of technical debt. It is also harder to define global processes because those processes are distributed across separate orgs. Data architecture/management also becomes more complicated. And the total cost of ownership increases with a multi-org strategy.

Now that we have the basics covered, it’s time to talk org management.

Let’s face it, even the most seasoned Salesforce admins can use a little help Keeping their orgs neat, organized and healthy. While there are many components to a healthy org, it all boils down to four key factors: data security, data quality, streamlined processes, and automation. And to help you better manage your orgs, the following are some helpful tips in each of these categories.

Improve Data Security

Data breaches are an unfortunate reality for most businesses. And proper org management is key to data security. You can build up your security by:

• Limiting permissions: Give your users only the permissions they need to do their jobs. This principle means fewer points of access to your most sensitive data. Snapshot has built-in features that automate this process for you.
• Get rid of technical debt: Technical debt refers to bad metadata. While a small amount of technical debt is normal, a Salesforce org that contains too much of it can become increasingly vulnerable and more expensive to maintain over time. Tools like Snapshot help you get a grip on technical debt.
• Educating your users: Users are the primary target of malware and phishing. Ensure that your users are aware of risks and understand how to mitigate them.

Monitor and Manage Data Quality

Maintaining quality data is one of the top concerns for most administrators. The more data you have, the more likely you are to encounter duplicates, faulty information or missing pieces. Data quality issues can be the result of user error, the absence of preventative safeguards or a lack of data hygiene. Help your data quality by:

• Better understanding your data: You can’t identify bad data if you don’t know what it looks like. Salesforce orgs run much better when data is accurate, complete, and consistent. Snapshot provides visualization tools that help you automatically identify and resolve data issues.
• Training users: Once you understand what your data should look like, standardize the process for all users.
• Deploying Snapshot: There are roughly 250 metadata types in Salesforce. Snapshot removes the “hide and seek” approach to monitoring and managing org data.

Streamline Processes

 Once you’ve cleaned up your data, you can start working on getting your orgs to work exactly how you want them to. A streamlined org means every user has the tools that they need to do their job and every admin understands how to maintain and support those tools. You can do this by:

• Making it easy to enter information: This is why training users and standardizing processes are so very important.
• Making it easy to find information: If you have a lot of data in your org, it can quickly become difficult to navigate. Mitigate this problem by building in simplifying tools like Snapshot.
• Communicating with users: It is important to understand exactly what your end users need from their orgs.

Automate!

 Going through repetitive, manual tasks is far too time-consuming. Instead, you can create automated processes. The key to this is:

• Understanding what to automate: The best candidates for automation are tasks that are repetitive, have consistent parameters and are applicable to multiple users.
• Creating processes: Once you’ve identified what you’d like to automate, map the process from start to finish to understand how each step can be handled with an automation tool like Snapshot.
• Using Snapshot: Metazoa Snapshot was the first org management solution designed specifically forSalesforce and was one of the first App’s offered on the Salesforce App Exchange. Over the years, Metazoa Snapshot has grown into the industry’s most comprehensive toolset for org management, relational data migration, org documentation, technical debt removal, and profile and permission set management.