Migrating From Managed To Unmanaged Salesforce Packages For A Fintech Solution Provider

The customer, a payment gateway provider, tracks and stores information about transactions between end-users and banks, providing end-to-end reports to the bank. They used the Salesforce system as their CRM, using various natively designed Salesforce features to collect customer-related databases and records and share it on different servers.

The customer had recently acquired some of their vendors, who were earlier providing their services for a fixed fee. Acquiring these vendors allowed them to save on these costs. As part of the onboarding of these newly acquired companies, the six managed packages they were using on Salesforce needed to be converted to unmanaged packages and integrated into the customer’s Salesforce CRM. These unmanaged packages would provide developers with the basic building blocks for applications and allow them to edit components. All dependencies that existed in these packages needed to be resolved without losing any data and setup configuration.

Middleware Cloud Server Backend SF DevOps Tool

To integrate these different systems, we used Heroku as the middleware, and Python as the backend technology to read and parse the metadata.

Python’s ability to read compressed files and folders, extract files and find references inside them helped us find dependencies and resolve and replace these with unmanaged references.

We created new compressed files with collections of modified content, and pushed these back into the system using Gearset. Heroku acted as the central node with connections to different systems to fetch data.

These were the steps involved in dependency management:

01. Identification

02. Replacement

03. Execution

04. Deployment

Identifying dependencies and references of managed package components across the entire Salesforce organization

Using Python as the backend technology to find dependencies and replace them with unmanaged entities

Executing Python scripts in the entire Salesforce code base with 60+ Salesforce components

Deploying the data with unmanaged entities back to the Salesforce organization using Gearset

These were some of the parameters taken into consideration during the migration:

• User Mapping: Ensuring that record ownership is set up correctly in the new system
• Security: Ensuring existing profiles and organization-wide defaults are properly set up in the new environment
• Space: Ensuring that the current Salesforce environment is large enough to handle the additional data being migrated into it
• Backups: Ensuring that the old data environment is backed up before initiating a new Salesforce data migration

This involved the identification of order of insertion of records into the Salesforce system while checking the consistency of naming parameters.

Since the customer was a payment gateway company, a large amount of customer data needed to be loaded in Salesforce. Heroku was used to load bulk data using CSV files.