Salesforce - How to Deploy between Environments (Sandboxes, Live etc)

Question

We\'re looking into setting up a proper deployment process.

From what I\'ve read there seems to be 4 methods of doing this.

1. Copy & Paste -- We don\'t w

Answer 1

As of Spring '09, mail merge templates are not supported in metadata but record types are. You will find record types as an XML element in the file for the object they belong to. Everything else on your list is supported with a small exception. Picklist values for standard fields cannot be edited in Spring '09. Stay tuned for news on Summer '09 feature announcements.

Update: Standard picklists on standard objects are now metadata exposed (as of API v16): http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/api_meta/Content/meta_picklist.htm

Otherwise, Steve Lane's response is pretty accurate. The advantage of using unmanaged packages (what Steve calls non-installed packages) is that when you add metadata to a package, the metadata it depends on will automatically be added. So it's easier to grab a full set of metadata containing all its dependencies. If you are repeatedly moving metadata from one org (sandbox) to another (production), Steve's approach is probably the best way to go and certainly the most common today. I frequently use unmanaged "developer" packages to move something I've developed in one org to another unrelated org. For my purpose, I like to have the package defined in the org as opposed to an Eclipse project / SVN. But that probably doesn't make sense if you are doing team development across many dev/sandbox orgs and are using SVN already.

Jesper