The lack of the ability to copy a sandbox when creating a new sandbox or exporting a company from a sandbox is a serious limitation to the cloud product which leads to a flawed development and code promotion process. The standard development process is to separate the development, test, and production databases. Once development of a task is complete, the code is promoted from development to test. Developers should be doing initial unit testing before promoting changes to test. The development database tends to have limited data which prevents proper testing by the developer. This has led to developers developing in test or promoting unfinished or untested changes. Clients are trained to test in test to confirm functionality before it is promoted to production. Customers are running into errors in partially developed solutions and messages that the administrator has made a change and have to close and reopen as developers promote new code.

Using configuration packages to export all data in all tables is not a viable solution. The import/export time is prohibitive and the time it takes to build the configuration packages is prohibitive.