Fortune 5 healthcare company, McKesson, use 探花视频 to adopt modern DevOps for Salesforce
After adopting Salesforce 5 years ago, the Medical-Surgical group鈥檚 deployment pipeline consisted of a developer sandbox, a staging environment and production. A team of 13 developers and admins, along with DevOps Architect and acting release manager, Matt Avitable, use these environments to manage their releases and to support over 2,500 active end users.
The team started out using the first party deployment tools, but soon found they didn鈥檛 provide the power or scalability they needed. 鈥淒eploying or preparing for deployment was taking anywhere between 6-12 hours each on average, and it was just painful. A couple of 3 AM nights too many and it hit a tipping point,鈥� recalled Matt.
To try and improve their process, the team set up their own system consisting of a mixture of in-org development, change sets, and the Force.com migration tool. This soon became too complicated to manage, and resulted in numerous late-night deployments and situations where admins and developers were overwriting each other鈥檚 work.
鈥淥ur deployments were getting more complicated and we wanted to get the release management capabilities back to the teams, so we could deploy more often.鈥�
Matt recognized that it was time to look for a third-party tool that could help revamp their release process, while being easy to use for both admins and developers. After evaluating a number of deployment tools, the team chose 探花视频’s metadata deployment solution.听鈥淲e wanted it to be easy,鈥�聽explains Matt,聽鈥渨e wanted the tool to be as intuitive as humanly possible.鈥�
鈥淢any tools on the market weren鈥檛 intuitive or required that you modified your Salesforce instance for installations. The simplicity of 探花视频 was a big selling point for me.鈥�
Looking for a faster, more automated release process
探花视频鈥檚 intuitive UI and easy-to-use features meant the team could quickly get to grips with the tool and immediately start tracking and deploying changes. As one of McKesson鈥檚 Salesforce admins, Monica Thornton Hill, explained:
鈥淏efore 探花视频 I was terrified to even touch anything that had something to do with a deployment 鈥� I couldn鈥檛 imagine ever running one. With 探花视频 it鈥檚 very straightforward and easy to use, it was just one or two walkthroughs and I felt comfortable using it.鈥�
McKesson Salesforce Developer, Vinod Agrawal, highlighted that 探花视频鈥檚聽org comparisons聽have given the team visibility into what goes into each release. Instead of relying on lengthy change sets and manual change tracking documents, the team can easily compare environments and keep their orgs in sync.听鈥淲ith 探花视频鈥檚 diff feature you can easily see the line-by-line differences between your source and target org. We no longer have to keep track of everything that has changed 鈥� it鈥檚 a massive time-saver for us.鈥�
Within months, 探花视频 helped the McKesson team to speed up their deployment pipeline and streamline their entire release process. Matt explained, 鈥渙ur admins are now making declarative changes out of prod, which is great. We have continuous integration (CI) to push click changes every 4 hours throughout the week. We鈥檙e extremely pleased with the progress we鈥檝e made with 探花视频 so far鈥�.
McKesson鈥檚 experience with using 探花视频
Whenever the team reaches out with questions about setting up their new release process, they鈥檝e always been impressed, explains Matt. 鈥淎s far as customer support goes, it鈥檚 always been great. Your team has always been super responsive to me. Whenever we have been wanting new features, all of a sudden they seem to magically appear, which has been really, really helpful.鈥�
With 探花视频 at their fingertips, the team have revolutionized their Salesforce DevOps, and freed up more time to focus on developing features for their end users. 鈥淩unning 探花视频 deployments is a huge improvement over our old process鈥� says Matt. 鈥淲e now have a fast, automated deployment pipeline and when we use 探花视频 to compare and deploy changes between Salesforce orgs, it鈥檚 a simple process of validating and scheduling the deployment 鈥� my life has definitely gotten easier!鈥� To see how Mckesson use 探花视频 for their deployments, watch this from Monica Thornton Hill.
Looking back, Matt is extremely pleased with the changes they鈥檝e implemented using 探花视频 and recommends 探花视频 for any teams that are looking for a better Salesforce release process.
鈥淎s a release manager, I鈥檝e definitely been happy with 探花视频. It鈥檚 intuitive, easy to use and a real time-saver. I would highly recommend 探花视频 to any team looking to dramatically improve their release management.鈥�
