Tips and Tricks for Salesforce Admins and Developers: What You Never Knew Spanning Could Do

At Spanning, our customers are at the heart of everything we do — from design to delivery to ensuring that our product works the way you expect, to providing enterprise-grade security and world-class support. In this blog for Salesforce admins and developers, we go deep and beyond backup, to share some useful tips and features so you can make the most of your Spanning Backup subscription.

At Spanning, our customers are at the heart of everything we do — from design to delivery to ensuring that our product works the way you expect, to providing enterprise-grade security and world-class support.

In this blog for Salesforce admins and developers, we go deep and beyond backup, to share some useful tips and features so you can make the most of your Spanning Backup subscription.

In case you’re unfamiliar with why people use Spanning Backup for Salesforce, here’s what Stephanie Herrera, Salesforce MVP, founder of Salesforce Saturday and co-founder of PepUpTech, has to say.

“I’m still loving Spanning Backup! Now that I’m at Spredfast, I set up Spanning again, because they too were only using the Salesforce weekly backup, so we resolved that right away by installing Spanning! A few months in, we decided to remove Data.com and replaced it with Discover.Org. What we didn’t realize at the time was that we would lose data tied to fields that we didn’t know were specific to Data.com. Luckily, we already had Spanning, and we were able to create new custom fields and populate them, with the data we “thought” we had lost. Spanning saved the day, yet again for me!”

#1 On-Demand Sandbox Seeding

Spanning Backup for Salesforce features the ability to seed sandboxes with backed up data from your production Salesforce instance. In this video, learn how to perform fast, easy Salesforce sandbox refreshes or seeding — any time, on demand!

#2 Automated Metadata Restores — for 14 Different Metadata Types

“When I need to restore down to the record and field level, [Spanning] is there for me. Low cost for the peace of mind it gives me everyday. Our metadata was never protected before and we had over 10 years of customization that we could have lost. It would have been tragic for our organization.” – Barbara Hill, IT Project Manager, The Nature Conservancy

Use Spanning to automatically backup and restore metadata, ensuring your customizations are protected. Spanning provides automated Metadata Restore for 14 metadata types: Dashboards, Reports, Email, Layouts, Objects, Permission Sets, Profiles, Roles, Triggers, Workflows, Classes, Pages, Flows and Flow Definitions.

#3 Fast Restores of Objects Owned by Inactive Users

Salesforce admins told us they needed to restore Objects owned by inactive users, but assign a different owner to those Objects at the time of restore instead of changing settings in their Salesforce org or reactivating those users just for the restore. Spanning Backup for Salesforce makes it easy.

#4 Automated Masking of Personal Identifiable Information (PII)

If your org has sensitive data in Salesforce (Personally Identifiable Information, or PII, such as Social Security Numbers, Credit Card Numbers, or healthcare data) you have the option to mask / overwrite field values for specific fields when you restore data from Spanning – automatically, so the sensitive data never lands in a sandbox. (See the above video for more details.)

#5 End User Self-Service of Restores

“We chose Spanning for the ability to give non-admins the permission to restore record level fields.” – Randy Perkins, Sr. Project Lead, ISN

Restoring data with Spanning is so easy that the end users can use on-page restores to quickly restore the records that they have edit rights to, directly from the record pages. No training is needed; admins can, in just a few clicks, set this up if they choose.

Share Your Tips and Tricks

We’re especially delighted when we hear about the specific features in Spanning Backup for Salesforce that have made your job easier, made you look like a hero, or, in fact, even saved the day. Are you already a customer? If so, how did Spanning help you? We’d love to know! Send us an email or review us on the Salesforce AppExchange.

Check out more Spanning Backup for Salesforce Resources