What is an Environment in Salesforce?

An Environment is an instance on cloud of force.com platform. In salesforce terminology we often call it an “ORG”. In our previous discussions we created a developer org – an environment. All our environments- developer, production, and sandbox can be accessed from any part of this world by using a web browser.

A very good example to understand the concept of environment is a house. A house is  a physical infrastructure located and built on land. How do you access it? Well you need to be on the land. How do you get inside it? Well you need a key? Right? Similarly an environment is an infrastructure located on cloud. How do you access it? Well you need to be on Internet (browser). How do you get inside it?  Well your login credentials are your keys to access your environment which is floating on the cloud. Once you are in the instance of force.com platform you can access, deploy create applications with various features.

What are the main types of Salesforce Environment?

      1) Production Environment

This is your main org where you have active users (internal, external, paid users), administrators, working on the business data. Production environment is your live data that runs your business.

2)   Developer Environment: 

      This is a free and fully featured copy provided by salesforce.com. By default you will find lot of data in developer org to play with.  You can build, develop, and integrate any app that is designed for your production environment.

3)   Test Environment /Sandbox: 

      Sandbox is the copy of your org usually it is the production photo copy. Changes made to the sandbox environment has no effect on your production environment.  In this environment you can test your configurations, train your end users, without effecting your production data.Test environments are usually refreshed on periodic basis to get the latest configuration and data of your production environment.

Why do you need a sandbox?

Let’s say, I want to build an application in my production environment.  Sandbox is where I would start building my application. I would test, modify the configurations, analyze the impact from all the directions and once I am thoroughly done and satisfied with all the testing then I would deploy or move my changes to the production. This reduces the risks of any failure and helps to run the production smoothly. It depends on the development and process model of a company how they implement these for example - Development and testing is done in  Dev sandbox , changes are moved to full sandbox followed by testing and then finally it is moved to the production. 

Few more examples of sandboxes are CONVERSION- Box ( for data migration), INT-Box (for integration), TEST-Box ( for testing) etc. A major salesforce implementation has two major components Data Migration and Integration. Lets say an insurance company has 1000 sales agents and now when they implement salesforce they have to migrate data from multiple systems or legacy systems or from papers. Data could be huge worth more than 15 years, and if they have existing systems like oracle, SAP they will have to build custom integration. Which sandbox should be used depends on the scope and requirement of the project. 

Types of Environments:

Full Sandbox: This is the full copy of your production environment.

Partial Copy: This environment usually has all the customization of your production environment and some sample data of your production environment.

Developer Sandbox: This environment has all the customization of your production environment. It may or may not have your production data.

Developer Pro Sandbox: This is again similar to developer sandbox but has more data storage.

Partner Developer edition: This is a developer org with more data storage. Free for enrolled partners.