Salesforce Attachment Migration : A Task Not so Easy

It is not uncommon for companies to be in a position to migrate all their Salesforce files. It is also not uncommon in today’s fast growing companies, for them to divide their Org into multiple ones and export them as well. The problem arises when the Salesforce attachments associated with these files need to be exported as well. Not only are these attachments numerous in number for many companies, but the individual attachment sizes are also prohibitively large for companies to be able to easily do this task. So, does that mean that once a firm hooks on to a platform, it is stuck there for ever? Are there work arounds through which migration does not seem to be this unsurmountable migraine that it looks like now? The answer and solution, as always comes form the third party solution providers.

The necessity to split the Org of any firm or company into multiple salesforce.com Orgs is a normal request that emanates today for all Salesforce professionals and consultants. This task is primarily aimed towards improving the various business processes that are associated with the company and migrating into the new associated Orgs. To accomplish the migration of the data seems like a time consuming laborious task, but simple enough in nature, until we look to migrate the associate Salesforce attachment. A small/medium sized company may have attachments ranging from a few lakhs to a few millions and the size of each of these attachments may be anywhere between 1 MB and 3 MB.

A cursory glance at the Salesforce Online Help would point towards the Data Export feature in the Salesforce settings. Data management has an inherent setting to export data. So, if you are in the market to migrate, then the very first step would be to export the documents. The data export feature does not automatically schedule the export go the Salesforce attachments, along with the data. This needs to be done by specifically selecting the Export Attachments option. If one thought that this was not that easy, then imagine a period of a couple of days of timeframe for successfully exporting data for a single company and that too in generic CSV files. The exported items may not be very conducive to work with because of the generic nature of output. So, an over arching export of data may not be the most sensible way to go and ways and means to export only the required targeted data needed to be evolved.

The knights in shining armour in this case are the third party application tools, which are readily available in the AppExchange ecosystem. These tools also afford use of specific fields as filters to categorise the CSV files and their related attachments, in separate folders. The exported attachments are smartly organised in these subfolders, based on the fields selected and make much more sense for the organisation. A major obstacle in migrating data and Salesforce attachments has been reasonably been addressed. However, the process to do the same varies from app to app. But help is at hand and the effectiveness of the exercise has been established. Welcome to a world where one more barrier of the Salesforce ecosystem has been broken.

Pratik Gaikwad Content writing