Keeping your Salesforce orgs in sync is one of the most impactful resolutions you can make in 2025. Orgs fall out of sync for various reasons:

• Hotfixes made directly in production
• Changes deployed from one team member’s personal sandbox aren’t always synced or back-promoted to colleagues’ sandboxes
• Abandoned changes stuck in the middle of the pipeline and more

These gaps add up, leaving orgs misaligned.

‍The impact? Testing becomes unreliable. If your orgs aren’t aligned, you can’t trust your test results. This leads to false confidence, missed issues, and deployment headaches. Let’s explore how to fix it.

‍Start 2025 (Re)Fresh

‍Refreshing a sandbox is a great way to reset and ensure your environments are aligned. But refreshes come with trade-offs:

• Work in progress lost: Any active development, metadata changes, or testing efforts in a sandbox can be wiped out, erasing uncommitted work in private sandboxes and disrupting ongoing testing or integration in shared environments. 
• Data lost: Sandbox-specific testing data is removed, requiring you to recreate or re-import test scenarios.
• Paused work: A refresh requires everyone to pause their activities in shared environments. Developers, testers, and admins may need to halt tasks to accommodate the process.

Given these challenges, it’s essential to adopt habits and practices that minimize the need for frequent refreshes. Here are some key tips to keep your orgs in sync.

‍Tips for Keeping Your Orgs in Sync

1. Start with an updated environment - Develop a habit to ensure your sandbox is frequently updated, especially when working on a new feature. This ensures your work is built on the current state of the org.
   
   
2. Establish a release process - If you haven’t yet, 2025 is the time to establish a release process and ensure the team follows it. It may take time for everyone to adapt, but the long-term benefits are worth it: better collaboration, clearer expectations, and a structured way to troubleshoot when something breaks. Once the process is in place, enforce it—this might mean occasionally checking if someone made direct production changes, but it’s all part of keeping things in sync.
   
   
3. Define a process for the out-of-process - Like it or not, direct production changes happen. Instead of pretending they won’t, establish a plan for handling them. Start by monitoring changes made in production and ensure they’re back-promoted to lower environments. Anything done outside the usual process should be accounted for downstream.
   
   
4. Don’t let changes get stuck in the pipeline -  If you’ve worked on a feature and later decided not to deploy it, archive it elsewhere. Whether in a dedicated sandbox or Git, the key is to remove it from active orgs to prevent clutter and confusion.
   
   
5. Improve team communication - Misalignment often stems from miscommunication. Ensure the team has regular check-ins and clear communication channels to stay coordinated.
   

Use tools like Salto

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A DevOps platform like Salto helps keep orgs in sync without requiring full refreshes (which often lead to data loss). With Salto, you can selectively sync metadata, choosing only the elements that need alignment. This means you don’t have to pause work or risk losing in-progress changes. You can compare orgs at any time, generate a clear diff report, and sync only the necessary components—ensuring a smoother, more controlled process. Learn more >>

Conclusion

‍Keeping Salesforce orgs in sync doesn’t have to be an uphill battle. By adopting these strategies and tools, you can reduce misalignment, increase team confidence, and streamline deployments in 2025. Start small, experiment, and build processes that work for your team.

Here’s to a smoother, more aligned year ahead!

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