Sandboxes and templates

A sandbox is a Salesforce tool that, as a Salesforce administrator, you may already know well. It is basically a staging area to do revisions, testing, or updates that will not impact the production instance of Salesforce. Let's review the essentials and some best practices around sandboxes. Then, we will look at specific ways that sandboxes and the templates that are available for Nonprofit Cloud can be used.

Sandbox essentials

Customizing a Salesforce instance should always be done in a sandbox; although Salesforce allows you to make changes directly in production, best practices and vast experience recommend working in a sandbox. This creates a copy of your production environment and allows you to make changes, test functionality, and train others, without affecting the actual production instance that your organization is currently using. Access sandboxes by going to Setup > Environments > Sandboxes. The following figure shows the type and...