Development to Production Deployment

We just deployed a client's website from a local development server to Azure, configuring the environment to be their production. We are a little confused on the process of deploying changes to the production environment.

The client, from my understanding, will be doing front-end and back-end administration which would most likely result in having records in the database that are not present in the database on the local SQL server.

From what I've read, a database download and merge is required in order to preserve the changes from both production and development.

Can you let me know what the process may be and if there are any tools available for me to use. I have looked into SiteSync/CodeSync/Code Deploy but the client has only purchased a Standard license for Sitefinity.

Thanks.

Hi, What did you guys do for this? Would you mind posting answer to this question?

For development you typically don't need the full production version of the DB as it would just be content changes or form submissions.  Periodically i would suggest refreshing the dev DB from production, typically don't need to "merge".  I would recommend to you and hte customer to not make changes like adding Custom Content types in production and to follow a dev/deploy process when adding new content types..

Thanks for the Answer!