The Force.com IDE
exposes the Metadata API,
to provide administrators and developers with some very powerful deployment
capabilities. Steve Andersen recently blogged about these capabilities and about how using the
Force.com IDE made his deployment process more efficient. Once Steve started
deploying via the Force.com IDE, his typical deployment process dropped from 8
hours per customer to about 2 hours. As a Force.com Technical Evangelist, I can
confirm Steve’s findings. I too have found the Force.com IDE to be a powerful
deployment tool and recently learned a new trick that has made it even more
efficient: Deploy the smallest subset of
configuration changes possible.