An Administrator's No-Code, One Day, Salesforce CPQ Migration (1)

There are two words to explain why a perfectly rational Trailhead Baby would decide to perform an impromptu Salesforce CPQ migration.  Those two words are: Step 15.  I am totally stuck on step 15 of the Billing Specialist Superbadge, and hesitate to make any changes to my org lest I have to start the whole superbadge again from step 1.  Fortunately, the solution is simple:

1. Backup the current Trailhead Playground ("old")
2. Migrate to a new Trailhead Playground ("new")
3. Check that my new Playground is accurate
4. Mess with the new playground until I think I have the right settings to pass step 15.
5. Change my original playground to match.
6. Pass step 15.

If you are familiar with the Billing Specialist Superbadge, you need quote #15 to pass.  I did not want to corrupt quote #15, because this is an autonumber field that can not be overwritten. The only option is to pass the first time, but to do so, I needed an environment to play with that is not related to my original, good, playground.  

Are you a little curious how a Admin like myself did an entire org migration with no developer background and barely any knowledge of the CPQ data model?  Read on, I'll share! 

It is ONLY possible to do a simple migration if you start with good tools.  A CSV dump of the records just would not work, because I had no idea what order to use for the inserts.  Salesforce CPQ stores a bunch of configuration as data, so the order is crucial.  Fortunately, the order did not matter for the copy step.   

What did I do? 

Download CopyStorm (https://www.capstorm.com/download/).  

There is a free trial if you want to try on your own. Open up CopyStorm and connect to Salesforce, and a little database called H2.  H2 is neat, because you can use it without installing anything extra - or knowing anything about databases!

The final step - It's really hard. Click "start" at the bottom of the screen.  I ran this on my laptop, and it took about 15 minutes to backup the whole Salesforce. 

Step 2 has a few "substeps" because there is some metadata that has to be pushed before the data.  It would be silly to create a record before all of the fields are in the new Salesforce.  If you are like me, you may not remember all of the field changes that you made during the Superbadge. Whoops!  This took a little trial and error.....

Start by downloading the tool that you will need- CopyStorm/Restore from www.capstorm.com.  If you want to try this with your playground, send my mom an email to get access. (rebecca@capstorm.com).  You will also need to turn off Triggers for both Billing and CPQ in the new Salesforce - otherwise you will get error messages when pushing some of the records.  It is also a good time to do the little CPQ and Billing package check boxes that are need for the Billing Specialist Superbadge like "require approved quote"...etc.

How to turn off Triggers in Billing and Salesforce CPQ:

Connect and start pushing the metadata! 

Remember the password to the H2 database create from step 1?  Mine was "1234" so it was easy to remember.  If you can not remember, there is a little "import credentials" option on the top menu that will slurp in whatever you provided for the backup. 

Metadata Go!

My CPQ metadata migration started with a nice error message - Why? Because I tried to insert a process that used a field that was not present.  Whoops!  I started again, this time using my brain.  Value Sets were the first batch, followed by fields, and processes.  Later during my data push, I realized that I did not create the "provisioning method" field on Product - but the simple solution was to create the field, then do a second data push, this time, populating the field I missed on round 1.  It took about 20 minutes of trial and error to get all of my metadata into the new Salesforce.

Ready to talk about data?
You are going to have to wait until the next post!  (Or just click here to continue!)