DeployWise: Timing intelligence for optimal impact

DeployWise made its debut at Innovation Day 2024, InfoBeans’ annual flagship event.

Orchestrating downtime across different time zones, ensuring every Salesforce user has a minimum disruption. 

Deployment is tricky!

Especially when there are multiple time zones involved, apart from challenges like – scheduling, batches, and a deep system understanding. 

What are the typical deployment challenges?

Companies with a large number of Salesforce users across different time zones find it difficult to find an optimum time to deploy.

Salesforce admins struggle to find optimal time windows for production deployments and other tasks, considering factors like business hours, user availability, system performance, and business impact.

The current process requires manual consideration of multiple factors and can result in user disruptions and business impacts.

Deployment failure in production; new installation disruption can cause all users disruption for a single cloud and can lead to a huge loss of money.

Understand more with an example

Let’s say there are two teams, one working from India and the other from the US. Since a major chunk of earnings comes from the US region, the team needs a time zone that is more suitable for the US. It will be around 5.30 pm IST, so when the US time goes live, the users do not face any issues. 

Let us discuss one more

Imagine if there are five or six time zones involved, in that case, zeroing down on a single time zone is a Herculean task, it requires a lot of calculation and planning.

DeployWise is suitable in such situations. Simply punch in all the locations, say India, China, USA which have diverse time zones and the number of active Salesforce users who are using Salesforce. DeployWise will give an optimized time so that a minimum number of users will be affected. So at that time, Salesforce admins can run their performance batches and do deployments. 

More about DeployWise

Deploywise fetches active user data and categorizes it based on their time zones.

It provides the admin with the 10 best times to schedule tasks, taking into account user working hours and preferences, so that businesses can pick the time based on economic and user impact.

Provides the number and percentage of users affected by each time window.

Supports the generation of reports for a more effective DevOps process.

Its applicability

It is useful for companies with a large number of Salesforce users across multiple countries.

It helps minimize the disruption to business and user working time.

Prioritize Production tasks such as:

• Data load/mass data changes/transfer
• Package installation/upgrade, new setting enablement such as MFA
• Scheduling batches

What if the admins are not comfortable with the time suggested by DeployWise?

In that case, the tool will give a list of other sets of times, such as the second best or third best time, to prevent a minimum number of users from getting affected by that time zone. The tool lets you prepare your deployment activity, data loads, any integration that has to be run, any mass data changes, and data updates.

Why is the tool needed now?

The reliance on Salesforce platforms for business operations is at an all-time high, creating an urgent need for efficient deployment management solutions.

No existing solution on the Salesforce app exchange offers this specific combination of deployment scheduling and user impact analysis.

Current market trends show an increasing demand for software tools that minimize user and business disruptions during platform maintenance and updates.

What lies ahead?

The tool is not restricted to a number of locations, and any number of geographies can be added.  It is also scalable, as it could be implemented based on other systems like SAP. If there is a SAP team working in different countries, the tool can find out the best time when people can use SAP, deploy the run batches in SAP. 

As of now, the tool is completely free, but plans like a monthly subscription can be added as the tool matures.

**The product is not market ready yet and is in pre-development phase.