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bjohnston73bjohnston73 

Newbie Questions (Change and Config Management/Security)

I'm enjoying getting into Salesforce but I am running into issues where finding answers to questions both on-line and in books are not very detail oriented, specifically starting with change and configuration management:

 

I've got Eclipse hooked up and have discovered how to get the meta-data as well as deploy changes to another system.   When in Eclipse doing the deploy red appears to be things that are dropped, gray are things that have not changed, and yellow things that have changed, is this a correct statement?

 

More importantly though, and keeping in mind that I'm not very familiar with Eclipse, is there a command line tool that I'd be able to synchronize meta-data between systems?   The idea being that builds can be automated without requiring a 'build user' to have a copy of Eclipse and manually run through the Wizard to do a deployment.

 

My second question revolves around 'right tool for the job':  I've determined that you can create new objects, views, and just about anything by updating the meta data, but the tools are not very rich in features so you kind of have to know what you are changing and perhaps it is better to make the changes in directly on the web site and then pull them into Eclipse for deployments to other environments?

 

My third question is about security.   The security model of Salesforce is interesting in  the fact that it is only additive and any new profiles must be built from an existing profile - you can't build one from scratch.   It seems you can easily back yourself into a corner if you use the wrong profile to start off with.   To me, it almost seems easier to have a basic profile and then use permission sets to add required permissions to users similiar to add groups to a user in Active Directory, however what is have been the experiences of the group?

 

Thanks!