Migration between unrelated orgs

Question

Hi I will have to migrate code,reports and metadata between 2 unrelated orgs and I have concerns regarding few components.

reports

I remember having problems while deploying report folders. I had to create the folders manually in production. I think it was caused by the fact that the folder was created in sandbox by a user that didn't exist in production. If I deploy reports via ANT/Eclipse should I expect similar pains?

approval processes

Another problem I experienced when deploying to related orgs via changeset was being unable to deploy an approval process and a new queue it was using in the same step. Will the problem occur when I move code to the brand new Salesforce instance? Should I prepare 2 migration tasks? Will I have to deploy all actions (field updates email templates) separately?

Similar one. What if my processes reference particular users that obviously don't exist in the new org. Will I have to replace the user data in the xml one by one with some temporary value and edit the process after migration

What are the best practices when migrating orgs. Are there occasions when one deployment isn't enough ant components need to be split in several bundles for the Migration tool.

Answer 1

click the checkbox of folder sharing 'Enable access level of sharing reports and dashboards folders'

What i have previously observed is that usually if source org has folder sharing enabled and destination does not have ,we get this unexpected error .Certainly something sfdc needs to take care

Quick fix for the same is to check the folder sharing in destination if source has this and then try deploying the same .

Hope this helps you.

Answer 2

Yes, you will have to split your migrations into pieces to get a successful migration.

For Report Folders, the folders are defined in a *-meta.xml file. So, if you include that file with your migration package, you do not have to precreate your folder at the destination (production or not).

Queues, however, have to be pre-created (using metadata API) before you migrate metadata that depend on them. The deployment algorithm fails to take that into account if you migrate them together.

Changesets, obviously, will not work if you are crossing the production Org boundary. If you need to do that, you will need to use Eclipse or ANT (Force.com Migration tool) or a third party tool. Shameless plug: My company, DreamFactory, offers SnapShot to do backups, comparisons, migrations and compliance documentation. Please let me know if you need more info. Or just need to talk about these scenarios a bit more.

Good luck.

Sridhar