Build a Work.com App for AppExchange
Join the effort to help the world return safely to work
What is Work.com?
Work.com is a suite of apps, data, and content to help businesses return to work, while keeping employees, customers, and communities safe during the COVID-19 crisis and beyond.
The Work.com apps provide solutions for emergency response planning, employee health assessments, volunteer and grant management, shift scheduling, and manual contact tracing.
Work.com also includes myTrailhead to help businesses skill up their workforce with customizable training to meet the challenges of a new era.
The Workplace Command Center is the hub of Work.com. It serves as the ‘cockpit’ where business leaders and operations executives can monitor return-to-work readiness, make data-driven decisions, and take action.
The Workplace Command Center integrates apps built by Salesforce and our AppExchange partners, along with attractive visualizations of public health data.
How can AppExchange partners join the effort?
You can help the world return safely to work by building applications that integrate with the Workplace Command Center, and that complement the Work.com apps built by Salesforce. You can create a brand new app, or extend an existing solution, and use Lightning Web Components to expose your app’s features in the Workplace Command Center user interface.
Building Your Work.com App
If you already know how to build apps for AppExchange, then you know how to build Work.com apps, too. And if you’re new to AppExchange, we’ve got you covered with free training on Trailhead.
The Workplace Command Center and the Work.com apps built by Salesforce are available as managed packages. That’s the same technology that AppExchange partners use to distribute and update their custom applications.
The Workplace Command Center is implemented as a Lightning Page, so you can build your own Lightning Web components that users will drag and drop into their Command Center layout. Your components could display data visualizations, or buttons to initiate workflows, for example, or any feature that users need to access quickly from the Workplace Command Center.
Distributing Your Work.com App
You could distribute your Work.com app as a standalone managed package, or as an extension that adds functionality to another package. Thanks to the power of the Lightning Message Service (LMS), your app is decoupled from the Workplace Command Center, and your app’s managed package doesn’t need to extend the Command Center’s package. Instead, your app just subscribes to the Command Center’s LMS channel and responds to events published there.
New Standard Objects
With the release of Work.com, Salesforce’s Customer 360 Platform also added several new standard objects for employee information, health assessments and facility management. You can see a simplified object relationship diagram below. A new permission set license (PSL) controls user access to these Work.com objects.
Editions and Licensing
Work.com is available to customers running Salesforce Enterprise, Unlimited and Performance editions. Users that access the Workplace Command Center or the new Work.com objects must have at least a Lightning Platform Starter license.
Separate Org for Work.com
The Work.com org will likely store sensitive, employee health data, and access should be restricted accordingly. Therefore, we recommend that customers use Work.com in a separate Salesforce org, not in their regular business or CRM org. Some customers may already have a separate org where they manage human resources, for example, while other customers may elect to purchase a brand new org just for Work.com.
Publish Your Work.com App on AppExchange
The process for publishing a Work.com app is essentially the same as publishing other apps on the AppExchange. You’ll create a managed package containing your app’s components, and an associated listing with the app’s description, screenshots, and pricing information. You’ll submit the package for security review, after which your customers can install your app in their orgs with a single click.
Next Steps
Check out the Workplace Command Center for Work.com Developer Guide. It includes detailed instructions for setting up your development environment and building an app that integrates with the Workplace Command Center. The guide also covers packaging, provisioning, and licensing your new Work.com app.
And join the Partner Community Chatter group Work.com for AppExchange Partners today. It’s the main collaboration forum for AppExchange partners building new Work.com apps.
We can’t wait to see what you’ll build to help the world return safely to work!
