Get a 360° View of Your Package with the Salesforce ISV Technical Enablement Plugin
If you’re an AppExchange partner who wants to build the best version of your product, the ISV Technical Enablement Plugin for Salesforce (ISVTE Plugin) is the tool that gives you a 360-degree view of your entire application. It looks at your managed package in its entirety and provides information about how you’re leveraging the Salesforce platform and how that usage will impact your customers today and in the future. Best of all, this is not generic information. The suggested resources, best practices, and alerts are all tailored to your needs.
Let’s take a look at how you can use the ISVTE Plugin to learn about your package.
Installation
Thanks to the Salesforce CLI, the ISVTE plugin is very simple to install.
First, make sure you have the most recent version of the Salesforce CLI installed. Instructions for your operating system are available here.
After that, we can take advantage of the plugin architecture and install the ISVTE plugin.
sfdx force:plugins:install isvte-sfdx-plugin
That’s it. You’re done.
Now you can scan your application by pointing it to the folder containing your package.xml file.
sfdx isvte:mdscan -d <metadataFolder>
Reading the report
The report generated by the ISVTE Plugin has multiple types of information about your application.
The first and most fundamental part of the report is a detailed package inventory, which tells you about all the technology included in your package.
Building off of that inventory, the ISVTE Plugin provides enablement resources to help your engineers use the technology to its fullest. Are you including TableauCRM assets? You should learn about the best way to package them, as it will also provide suggestions on additional tools or usages that are not included but should be. If you do data processing in Apex and you’re not leveraging Platform Cache, the ISVTE Plugin will tell you why and how you should consider adding it.
In addition to enabling you on the platform technologies, the tool checks for adherence to best practices and potential roadblocks. For example, with the increasing footprint of Hyperforce, it’s very important that your app only uses instance-less URLs to connect to an org rather than hard coding URLs or dynamically generating a URL that includes the instance name.
Some best practices are more urgent and Salesforce issues Partner Alerts to push that information. You probably receive these via email or the partner community and need to do some work to determine whether or not you need to act. With the ISVTE Plugin, only alerts that apply to you will be highlighted.
Finally, the ISVTE Plugin reports on dependencies and other issues which can restrict which potential customers can use your application. Some metadata types aren’t available in Professional or Group edition orgs and that’s important to know. If your package extends to another package, it will tell you. If your package relies on the existence of a licensed feature or a particular cloud, it will tell you that too.
Feeding back to Salesforce
There are a few situations where the Salesforce AppExchange team might ask you to run the ISVTE Plugin.
You’re probably familiar with the ISV Technology Adoption Survey which is part of the AppExchange Partner Program tiering. Using the ISVTE Plugin, you can easily answer many of the questions in the survey and ensure that you get all of the credit to which you’re entitled.
Your Technical Evangelist will also ask you to run the tool in advance of a consultation. A copy of the ISVTE Plugin report can help them understand your technological footprint ahead of time and make your meetings more effective.
Summary
As you can see, there is a lot of power in this little tool. Check out the official documentation here to learn more about specialized use cases, access the source code, and learn how to extend the plugin for your own needs.
