We are struggling with setting up our development environment.  We have SF Enterprise Edition, with on Full Sandbox.  Most of our development has been done by outside contractors, but we are going to be doing more in-house going forward.  That being said, however, we still have several big projects that are planned to be done externally.

We are using BigMachines (BMX Basic, Config, and Pricing), and , and find that we cannot do any real work in a Developer Sandbox because we need that data for our application.   I am familiar with the general concept of copying data by using a combination of Apex DataLoader and external IDs.  But it seems way more complicated than it should be to simply get this data copied over to another sandbox... normally I would not want to have to create custom fields throughout BMX's objects just to do this.

So my question is really about Partial Data sandboxes and SF Sandbox templates.  I have not been able to find many, if any, examples online where people seem to be using the Partial Data ones.

First, Is this because most big companies just purchase extra Full Data sandboxes for this type of multi-developer setup?

Second, am I correct that a Partial Data sandbox created via a template *would* allow us to select all of the BMX objects plus their data to be part of a new (say) Developer Pro sandbox?

Thanks,

Mitch