ForeFront Maestro – Our New Application for Orchestrating Release Management

Maestro, a ForeFront Service Accelerator (FSA), is an application for Release Management Best Practices.

Maestro is comprised of an ensemble of tools and utilities to facilitate efficient deployments. Where hours (and possibly days) would be spent deploying Salesforce Change Sets, Maestro can condense that process down to minutes and provide automatic email reports of deployment status, error logs and package files to keep visibility and oversight easy. The straightforward interface makes it accessible to not only Salesforce Developers, but Administrators and Business Analysts alike.

The streamlined release process provided by Maestro alleviates the frustrations felt from repeated iteration of change sets during deployment and validation failures. You can easily modify and replay the commands and re-use packages to push components to any Salesforce org.

Born out of our frustrations with deployment and used in house for years at ForeFront, these tools are used daily by the Developers and BA’s working across many client projects in varying Salesforce ecosystems.

Maestro ties together with version control which is not only great for developers needing to revert back or reference code, but for auditing purposes and industry specific regulations. Coupled with a Metadata backup feature that pulls down configuration and code, Maestro provides the benefit of environmental stability.

Maestro also features single click login for Salesforce and Workbench within the application, reducing the number of clicks to access different applications. With security at the top of every company’s “must-have” list, each deployment is carefully performed and logged through the Maestro application. Deployments are performed using Session IDs, avoiding the need to store passwords and usernames in plain text. Login records can be secured with profiles, permissions or sharing rules as needed making it easy to grant or revoke access across your Salesforce ecosystem.

“Maestro has reduced our deployment processes by nearly 70%” – Elise Fuscarino, Platform Applications Lead

Rounding out the feature set of ForeFront Maestro is a Custom Setting Diff to compare the data between two orgs, reducing manual user errors and verifying post-deployment steps during the Go-Live stage. In addition to Salesforce Metadata, Maestro offers SVMX EDL functionality – Extract, Diff and Load – ServiceMax configuration data for SFM transactions and Wizards. Easily identify differences in components that are causing unexpected result, select the components and migrate, getting functionality back up and running.

Technical documentation can be created to assist in the ramp-up of new engineers and admins to an existing project. Features include Apex Docs, a consolidated output of custom code with development comments, similar to Java Docs. The latest feature is for Generating Data Definition Language (DDL) that can be imported and automatically generate an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) diagram. We’ve found the ability to produce various types of documentation facilitates better performance and education throughout the company.