Sandbox Seeding with helpful sync

Sandboxes in Salesforce are mostly for development purposes, but also to educate employees on the processes of your business or for testing new configurations. In any case, it is often desirable to have realistic data in the sandboxes to make the experience as close to the real world as possible.

On educational sandboxes, real world data is almost a must-have. You don’t want to train your employees on artificial data. And developers want to test their algorithms on data that is close to the real world – maybe even on edge cases that they didn’t think of.

The problem with Sandbox Templates

Traditionally, you’d use Sandbox Templates with Salesforce. However, they have several drawbacks.

First off, Sandbox Templates are only available for Full and Partial Sandboxes, which both are expensive and do not permit record selection. Instead, they just provide random samples.

If you have prepared a dataset on another sandbox, then you can’t easily deploy said data without much manual effort.

Moreover, they do not solve the critical issue of data masking / anonymization, which is mandatory for many kinds of real world personal data from production. Of course, there are separate software packages for that.

helpful sync offers an all in one solution for sandbox seeding. Not only does it make data selection really easy, by allowing to cherry pick records, use list views or reports created by your users, it will also mask and anonymize the data on the fly with good random data. By good random data we mean an address will still look like an address, just like a fantasy one, not only a random combination of numbers and letters.

Data Masking with helpful sync

It’s really simply to select your data and then mask it. Once you have selected your data sources, just head over to the data protection tab and select the object you want to mask. Choose the appropriate options for the fields that should be masked.

Once you know which data you want in your data set, it literally only takes a few minutes to setup a repeatable sync that can be used for any sandbox you want to seed. We gladly help you set up your sandbox seeding template. Just contact us via Email or join our Discord Channel.