Connecting Salesforce Sandbox vs. Production to Copilot

When evaluating HG Insights, some teams ask whether they should connect their Salesforce sandbox environment first before connecting to production. This article explains our recommended approach and the technical considerations involved.

Our Recommendation: Start with Production in Read-Only Mode

We recommend connecting your Salesforce production instance directly, but initially configuring it in read-only mode. This approach allows you to explore and test Copilot's capabilities without making any changes to your Salesforce data, while avoiding significant technical overhead down the line.

Here's how this works in practice:

• Connect your Salesforce production instance with read-only permissions

• Do not install HG Insights Salesforce package yet

• Explore Copilot's features through our Chrome extension instead of the embedded Salesforce iFrame

• When you're confident and ready

  • enable write permissions

  • install our Salesforce package with the Salesforce iFrame

For scoring use cases specifically, we can push only a limited dataset initially (such as one week of scores) to minimize any impact while you evaluate HG Insights.

Why We Don't Recommend Starting with Sandbox

You cannot plug 2 different Salesforce instances into HG Insights. Salesforce sandbox and production environments would be treated as completely separate instances. If you connect a sandbox environment first and later want to switch to production, you would need to:

1. Create an entirely new Copilot account for production

2. Redo all your configurations, workflows, and customizations from scratch

This isn't a simple "switch" operation. You'd essentially be starting over with your Copilot setup, which means duplicating all the configuration work you completed in the sandbox tenant.

The read-only production connection will accomplish your testing goals without the overhead of managing multiple HG Insights instances.

Getting Started

If you're ready to connect your Salesforce instance, we recommend:

1. Starting with your Salesforce production environment in read-only mode

2. Using our web app and Chrome extension to experiment with features

This approach gives you full visibility into how Copilot works with your real data while maintaining complete control over when and how you enable write operations and deploy to your Salesforce users.

If you have questions about your specific setup or want to discuss your organization's needs, please reach out to our support team.