We have made quite a bit of changes to the Winter 14 release of SnapShot and some of these have not been highlighted yet. So, we want to take the time to highlight those for you here.

Custom Snapshot

You are starting to store their VisualForce code and other metadata in content management repositories. In a nod towards supporting this development and furthering our mission to make salesforce migrations smoother, we introduce Custom Snapshot. This is a feature that is available only in the Asset SnapShot View.

Custom Snapshot can be launched by going to Assets > Custom SnapShot. This facilitates you to create a snapshot by using a package.xml (which will retrieve the metadata from the currently logged in salesforce Org) or provide the capability to upload a ZIP file that contains all the metadata already retrieved from salesforce (or pulled from a content management repository somewhere). These custom created snapshots using the latter method (ZIP file) are identical to regular snapshots with one exception - there is no information about Created By or Created From Org. You can use them for every other purpose including comparing, migrations and reporting features available in SnapShot.

Editing Permissions Sets

We have provided the capability to edit Profiles for a very long time now. You have requested the same capability for editing Permission Sets as well. This has been implemented now. Please see the functionality in the Studio menu in both the Asset SnapShot View  as well as the Profile SnapShot View. It gives all the capabilities as theEdit Profiles.

Removing Unnecessary References

The Remove Profile References Not In Destination checkbox in the Push Assets wizard has long provided the capability to clean out the unnecessary references in your Profiles and smoothed the migration process. You have told us that we need to do better - we need to do the same for metadata like Permission Sets and Record Types. We have delivered that with this release. Permission Sets are cleaned out just like Profiles are. For Record Types, we clean out the picklist fields that are not being migrated over and nor are they already in the destination.

Extended Data Transforms

You have told us that Data Transforms needs to be able to handle many more types of metadata types. We have delivered that. Data Transforms can pre-process a bunch more items like Assignment Rules, Escalation Rules, Settings, etc.

We have a lot more in store in the next couple of months. Please use our Twitter account (@dfsoftwareinc) and Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/dfsoftwareinc) to keep track of our updates. And as always, if there is something that we could do better, please let us know at support@dreamfactory.com