Understanding and Using Sandboxes

Learning Team

Overview

A sandbox is a copy of your Practifi instance in a separate environment that you can use for a variety of purposes, such as testing and training. Sandboxes are completely isolated from your production organization. The operations you perform in a sandbox don't affect the production version of your Practifi organization, giving your team a safe space to explore product features and train users without risking live data. This article covers the basics of sandboxes and explains how to request a sandbox and grant access to other users in your firm.

Understanding Sandboxes
Requesting a Sandbox
Using a Sandbox

Understanding Sandboxes

It's important to know the difference between a partial copy sandbox and a full sandbox. A partial copy sandbox contains only a portion of the data in your organization's production environment. It is capped at 5 GB of data storage and has a limited number of records per object. A partial copy sandbox is intended to let you test product features using a smaller subset of data. You can request a partial copy sandbox at no additional charge.

As the name implies, a full sandbox contains a copy of all the data in your production organization, enabling testing scenarios that require your complete dataset. Another distinction is that while a partial copy sandbox can be refreshed every five days, keeping your test environment closely aligned with production, a full sandbox can only be refreshed every 29 days. For more information on sandboxes, see this Salesforce Help article. Unlike partial copy sandboxes, full sandboxes are a platform add-on.

When a sandbox is created, all the users and licenses in the production environment are copied over. Users will have the same level of access in the sandbox as they do in production.

Please note: If new users are created or additional licenses are ordered in the production environment after the latest sandbox refresh, they will not appear in the sandbox until the next refresh.

Requesting a Sandbox

To request a sandbox for your Practifi organization, please get in touch with your Client Success Manager. You should let them know whether you want a partial copy or a full sandbox and which users in your organization should have access. The Practifi team will create the sandbox and send a password reset email to the users you specify. Admin users in the sandbox can also grant access to additional users, as detailed below.

Using a Sandbox

Logging In

If you are one of the users granted access when the sandbox is created, you will receive a password reset email from Salesforce. Click the link in the email to reset your password. Be sure to save the following information:

Sandbox URL: https://test.salesforce.com/
Username
Password

Provisioning Additional Users

When a sandbox is created, the sandbox name is appended to each existing user's production username. Additionally, their email addresses are given the .invalid domain (e.g., firstname.lastname@companyname.invalid) to prevent users from receiving notification emails from the sandbox environment that could be mistaken for those from the production environment.

Admins can grant access to additional users by updating those users' email addresses and generating a password reset in Salesforce Setup. Do the following:

In your production environment, navigate to Salesforce Setup by clicking the gear icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen and selecting Setup.
Use the Quick Find search to search for and select Sandboxes.
On the Sandboxes page, click the Login link next to the sandbox you want to access.
In the sandbox, navigate to Salesforce Setup by clicking the gear icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen and selecting Setup.
Use the Quick Find search to search for and select Users.
On the All Users page, click the Edit link next to the user you want to grant access to.
On the User Edit page, update the Email field to the user's correct email, then click Save.
Back on the All Users page, check the box next to the user's name, then click the Reset Password(s) button.

Please note: Once you've confirmed the user was able to reset their password and log in, we recommend repeating the steps above to change their email address back to the .invalid domain name to prevent unwanted notifications.

Viewing License Usage

The number of licenses being used might differ between your sandbox and production environments. To view license usage in your sandbox:

Navigate to Salesforce Setup by clicking the gear icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen and selecting Setup.
Use the Quick Find search to search for and select System Overview.
On the System Overview page, scroll down to the Most Used Licenses widget. Optionally, you can click the Show All link to view a more detailed breakdown on the Company Information page.