Journey to AppExchange and Beyond — Part 2

Published in

AppExchange and the Salesforce Ecosystem

6 min readDec 23, 2019

In our previous post, we discussed AppExchange, the AppExchange Partner Program, and the journey from app concept to marketplace. Now we’re going to talk through the tools and resources available to help you deliver amazing products on AppExchange.

What are the tools and resources available to ISVs to support successful AppExchange product delivery and customer satisfaction?

You‘ve published your app and are ready to sell, what more is there to talk about? A lot.

There are lots of tools and resources available to help with ISV app growth and customer satisfaction. Many of these tools can be used while you are planning and building your product. Careful and recommended use of these can ensure a smooth delivery to AppExchange and customer satisfaction.

But you may be wondering how and when to use these tools. We‘ll walk you through each tool and the scenarios where they can be used, however, we will not be doing a deep dive. We recommend you take advantage of several available webinars on the ISV Technical Success Center if you’re looking for next-level information.

There is also a helpful Trailhead module that introduces these tools and walks through where each of those fit in AppExchange product lifecycle.

Partner Business Org (PBO)

Every ISV receives a partner business org (PBO) when they sign up on the Partner Community. The PBO will initially be a trial org that expires in 90 days, but once your app passes AppExchange security review, Salesforce will convert the PBO to a full-fledged, active org that doesn’t expire as long as you remain an AppExchange partner in good standing.

The PBO comes with two system administrator licenses and if you need more, you can purchase additional licenses from your company’s assigned Salesforce account executive (not from your partner account manager). In a moment, we’ll discuss why you’ll probably want to purchase a few more licenses.

The PBO has all the tools you’ll need to update your AppExchange listing; place orders with Salesforce; provision new developer, trial, or demo orgs; and provide technical support to your customers.

Important: As you go through your journey and until your org is activated, you need to make sure this org doesn’t expire. Otherwise, you’ll lose the work you may have done on this org with no way to recover it.

Environment Hub allows ISVs to create new orgs for use during their development and demo processes. Environment Hub also allows ISVs access to special org types which are not available outside of AppExchange Partner Program.

Publisher Console

To access the Publisher Console, visit the partner community and click on the tab “Publishing.” This is where you will create and manage your AppExchange listing and review analytics — for example, the number of listing views, downloads, etc.

App listing is where partners can decide how their app will be delivered. For example, can customers install your app directly from the AppExchange? Or should customers contact you first to arrange a demo?

You can also set whether the app will be trial or active upon installation, and if the app license will be per-user, or org-wide by default.

You can also setup which org will receive leads when a customer clicks “Get it Now” button on their listing.

Another setting is to select an org where License record is created once app is installed; most likely PBO org as it has the License Management App.

License Management App (LMA)

When ISV app is installed in customer org, a license record is created. This provides org ID where app is installed, package version, etc., which can be used to do Push Upgrades when new package versions are uploaded

Channel Order App (COA)

A purchase order needs to be submitted with Salesforce when a customer purchases an ISV app. Channel Order App has the product catalog where you can place orders with Salesforce.

Subscriber Support Console

Subscriber Console allows ISV support teams to be able to login to customer org as a customer user, go through the repro steps and debug the application to find bugs.

Login through Subscriber Console allows support to be able to see debug statements in Apex Debug logs from ISV code which will otherwise be hidden when viewed directly on customer org; this is to protect ISV IP.

Once a bug has been identified, ISV will go through the process of fix, test, and upgrading customer apps to fix that bug. Support team can use the same console to verify that bug has been fixed.

Tools outside of Partner Business Org (PBO)

There are other tools which are available outside of PBO and are equally important in the product lifecycle.

Push Upgrade

Push Upgrade is an important feature to be able to use API to push package upgrades (for bug fixes and new features) to existing customer orgs. This can also allow ISVs to automate this process, reducing the manual work required of updating each org individually.

One thing to note is this feature is used from packaging org used to develop and package the app, not PBO.

Trialforce Templates

A common requirement is to demo a product during sales lifecycle or even while working on an opportunity.

ISVs can create Trialforce templates with their app pre-configured along with sample data. Sales teams can use these to quickly create an org to demo their product and save huge amounts of time by not having to install, configure, and setup the app prior to each demo.

ISVs can create multiple templates with different customizations for different sales plays.

Signup API

One way to create orgs from Trialforce templates is to use Environment Hub

But there is also an API available that can be used to create these orgs. This allows the possibility of providing extra information while creating a new org.

One important example is to be able to provide Locale information which decides data center where the org will be created. With this, ISVs can create orgs in Americas, Europe of Asia data centers.

Who will use these tools?

We talked about all the tools available for ISVs. However, ISVs need experts who can use these tools effectively that can have a significant impact on any process.

Following are some of the skills required for each of these roles and tools. Please use this as a guidance and not recommendation. We also cover who can be the possible users for each tool.

Skills

COA, LMA: Salesforce Admin
Subscriber Console: Customer Service
Push Upgrades, bug fixes, feature development: Salesforce Developers specializing in building managed packages

Users

COA, LMA: Administrators
Subscriber Support Console: Support teams
Push Upgrades: Release teams
Sign Up API, Trialforce Templates: Developers, Sales teams, Sales Engineers, Product Managers, Quality Assurance

Summary

One huge advantage of the AppExchange Partner Program is availability of specialized tools and resources available for ISVs so they can focus more on innovation. In this article, we talked about many tools available and expert skills needed for each and users of those tools. Careful use of these tools can have a positive impact on ISV success and Customer satisfaction.

If you still have questions then make use of our partner office hours. These office hours are a great way to stay updated, interact with our program staff, receive direct feedback, learn best practices, and get answers to your questions.