Deployment question

Question

I apologize if this question is very similar to another which I asked, but I keep thinking of slightly different scenarios during a deployment.

We are currently working on a revamp of our current entire system which we will call "2.0". It will not get released for several months. In the meantime, we still have day to day changes which need to go into the current system in Production.

Our sandbox situation is currently this :

SandDayToDay - All day-to-day fix\changes gets done in here. We develop and test and then deploy to the current Production.

SandV2 - All of our development for our future 2.0 system is done here.

Sometimes we make changes in our SandDayToDay sandbox which are not only needed in the current Production system, but will also be needed in our future 2.0. Let's just say we are adding fields to objects\page layouts. In some cases we will need those fields in the future 2.0. Ideally, we would like to only do the work once, which would be to add the fields in SandDayToDay and deploy the fields and pagelayouts to SandV2.

However, in this particular case the page layout which will be used for those fields in our current Production will not exist in the future 2.0 system. It will be in a page layout which is completely different. It is a page layout which will be specific to our future system, and not currently in Production\SandDayToDay.

In this case is it not inevitable that the person adding the new fields to the SandDayToDay sandbox will have to MANUALLY go into the SandV2 sandbox and add those fields to the page layout which does not exist in the SandDayToDay ? I would think the best that can be done would be to deploy the fields to the SandV2 sandbox - but then the person would have to come into the SandV2 sandbox and MANUALLY add those fields to that page layout.

...or is there a better way to do this through the deploy process in Eclipse ? I'm guessing anything is possible in Eclipse, but the scenarios I'm thinking of seem more tedious than the user to just go in there and add the fields manually.

Anybody got some feedback on this ?

Thank you very much.

Answer 1

Whenever you develop a new system in parallel with maintaining the current system there will be overlap and duplication of work; it is inevitable (you can think of this as your incentive to keep the replacement project on schedule and to complete it as soon as possible.)

In your specific example, since the new Page Layout does not exist in v2, then yes, somebody will have to logon to both sandboxes and manually modify both Page Layouts.