The Force.com IDE greatly simplifies working with organization setups. Over at gokubi.com, Steve Andersen has noticed how much time you can save when using the IDE to set up new organizations based on a template:

“For each customer I deal with, the Metadata API will save me 6 hours [out of 8] of point and clicking in page layouts…. If you’re a consultant, you need to use the Force.com IDE and the Metadata API. It’s a massive time-saver and will only get better as more things are added”

Jesse Lorenz liked Steve's blog as well and posted a great article on how to deploy the smallest possible org configuration with the IDE.

The Metadata API is what makes the Force.com IDE tick. It lets you access and manipulate all the setup details of your Salesforce.com organization. For example, you can setup your own custom objects, complete with Apex code and custom layouts all by executing calls on the metadata API. You can do this through the Force.com IDE or you can write your own client code that accesses the SOAP version of the metadata API directly. We also provide a tool called the Force.com Migration Tool that can migrate an organization using the metadata API and some Ant tasks without using Eclipse or having to roll your own thing. Jon Mountjoy wrote a good intro to this tool in an earlier post.

In the upcoming Winter ‘09 release we’re adding even more features to the metadata API. We’ll be adding a new listMetadata() API call that retrieves property information about metadata components in your organization. This call is useful when you want to identify individual components in package.xml for a retrieve() call or if you want a high-level view of particular components in your organization. For example, you could use this call to return a list of names of all the CustomObject or Layout components in your organization, and use this information to make a subsequent retrieve() call to return a subset of these components.

We’re also extending the metadata API support to additional components such as

• Email Attachment
• Custom Labels
• Custom Report
• Report Type
• Dashboard
• List View
• Search Layout
• Translations
• CustomObjectTranslations

You can get more detail about current and upcoming metadata API features in the Winter '09 pre-release of the reference documentation.

If you ever need to set up multiple organizations with similar structures either inside one large enterprise or for your clients, the metadata API offers big productivity gains while giving you granular control over your deployments. The use cases addressed by the API will only continue to grow as we extend its coverage over the next and future releases.