Salesforce Adds Sandbox Templates

Salesforce is doing some pretty interesting stuff with the sandbox environment for DeveloperForce.

Using the DeveloperForce sandbox you can create copies of your data, allowing you to develop, test or train against, not just a sandbox, but a relevant and meaningful copy of your company's data.

The Force.com sandbox has always allowed you to create a separate copy of your data, but now they let you create sandbox templates, allowing you to create specific data sets that you can reuse in different ways.

Seeing this feature coming out of Salesforce has prompted me to take a closer look at their approach to the DeveloperForce sandbox environment. I'm sure there are other features and approaches to sandboxing we can learn from the API pioneer.

This reminds me of the story I wrote about UC Berkeley's desire for An API That Scrubs Personally Identifiable Information From Other APIs.

As the API universe expands, I'm seeing a greater need for me to study and tell stories around API testing, monitoring, sandboxing and the best practices around API development and integration.