Salesforce.com Org Consolidation

Written by Brent Mellow   
Wednesday, July 21, 2010 10:53 AM

Salesforce.com Org ConsolidationFor large national and international clients, we often find companies with multiple instances of salesforce.com. In salesforce.com "speak" each instance is referred to as an "org" which is short for "organization". These independent orgs arise most often as a result of mergers and acquisitions where one company using salesforce.com purchases another using salesforce.com.  In other cases, large organizations will deploy separate orgs overtime for each country, divisions or business functions. This article addresses briefly some of the considerations for clients with multiple instances on whether to combine orgs or leave them as independent.  If you are considering create an incremental instance of salesforce.com, this article is also for you.

Pro's of Maintaining Separate Orgs

  • Less time is spent seeking "agreement" from one country or department to another to make changes
  • More rapid initial deployment
  • No risk of impacting another group when you make changes
  • Can be on different editions (e.g., One group could be on Professional Edition and another on Enterprise Edition)

Con's of Maintaining Separate Orgs

  • Potential for duplicate license costs if users need to access both orgs
  • No ability to run consolidated reports
  • No ability to assign tasks across groups
  • Duplicate data and inability to keep data consistent across orgs
  • Greater costs to set up similar processes/fields in both systems
  • More difficult to manage
Another consideration is that with the Enterprise and Unlimited Editions, you have great flexibility in creating custom page layouts and field requirements for different countries or divisions. In addition, over time, the cost to consolidate multiple orgs grows significantly, so if you are considering merging orgs in the future, or are just getting ready to deploy a new org, consider consolidating sooner rather than later.  Having seen thousands of salesforce.com projects and hundreds of multi-org relationships, I have seldom found a good reason for maintaining separate orgs.

What about Salesforce-to-Salesforce (S2S)?  This seldom used and often misunderstood feature is a way that 2 different orgs can share records with each other. This may be good for sharing certain records within 1 or 2 objects, but isn't a good solution for enterprise wide record sharing. It is a complex discussion and we'd be happy to investigate it with you to see if it is a fit.

Have multiple salesforce.com orgs that need consolidation, contact akaCRM to discuss your project.