Folsum Improves Salesforce Release Management with Summer 21 Release
Flosum, a leading Salesforce devops platform vendor based in San Ramon, California today announced the Summer ’21 release of its platform. New features announced include improvements to branch management, upgraded security, environment variable support, industry-standard devops metrics support, plus a brand-new backup utility.
Details about the upgrade are available immediately to Flosum customers, and upgrades will be rolled out on a customer-by-customer basis over the next months.
Many User-Driven Improvements
During an announcement webinar today, Flosum showed off several of system improvements and new features. Several of the features, based on the company’s commentary, should be welcome changes due to user feedback.
New branch management features include branch state diagrams, branch partial deployments, environment variables, and improved branch permissions.
Improved Deployment Analyzer
Improvements in the Flosum Deployment Analyzer were demonstrated during the webinar. The company showed how using Deployment Analyzer to check a pending deployment saves a release manager significant amounts of time by catching errors before attempting a metadata update, thus avoiding repeated update jobs.
Better Data Management
The company announced several improvements to their Data Migrator utility. These include improvements to org credential management and better support for Configure Price Quote (CPQ) applications.
The company also showed off improvements in in data masking and improvements to Flosum Sandbox.
In a move to improve data security, Flosum now supports the use of environment variables for API credential management and other secret management applications.
Additional Integrations
The company showed off 26 logos on its Integrations slide during today’s webinar. Recent additions to the list include “Code Quality” which includes Apex PMD and Checkmarx.
Flosum supports industry Salesforce AppExchange packages, including Apttus, nCino, Veeva, and Vlocity. During today’s webinar improved Vlocity support was announced.
New Backup Utility
In its first off-platform product offering, Flosum announced a new Backup Utility during today’s webinar. The system performs periodic, parameterized backup of org data. Org data can be restored to a new org. The system run on a customer public cloud account, with AWS being the first supported cloud, and with Azure and GCP becoming supported soon.
Making Customers Happy
Today’s Flosum announcements indicates the company is steadily improving their product offering, often guided by customer feedback. The vendor continues to be customer-centric, and very Salesforce-specific.
While this product strategy pleases existing customers, it doesn’t necessary help the company broaden its appeal to larger enterprises who need to manage more application platforms than just Salesforce. As Flosum focuses on Salesforce devops, it needs to pay attention to competitors who plan to expand their devops platform to multiple clouds.
