The Salesforce Partner Program has many advantages. The first place to visit is https://partners.salesforce.com/. You will want to focus on the areas of the site relating to being an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partner. From here, you can click on Join Now. It is free to join, though you will want to read through the various agreements carefully, of course.
Once you wish to start listing a package and charging users for it, you will need to arrange billing details for Salesforce to take the various fees involved. While this book is not equipped to go into the details, do pay careful attention to the Standard Objects used in your package, as this will determine the license type required by your users and the overall cost to them, in addition to your charges.
Obviously, Salesforce would prefer your application to use as many features of the CRM application as possible, which may also be beneficial to you as a feature of your application, since it's an appealing immediate integration not found on other platforms, such as the ability to instantly integrate with accounts and contacts.
If you're planning on using Standard Objects, and are in doubt about the costs (as they do vary depending on the type), you can request a conversation with Salesforce to discuss this; this is something to keep in mind in the early stages.
Make sure, when you associate a Salesforce user with the Partner Community, you utilize a user that you use daily (known as your Partner Business Org user) and not one from a development or test org. Once you have completed the signup process, you will gain access to the Partner Community. The following screenshot shows what the current Partner Community home page looks like. From here, you can access many useful services:
This is your primary place to communicate with Salesforce and access additional materials and announcements relevant to ISVs, so do keep checking often. You can raise cases and provide additional logins to other users in your organization, such as other developers who may wish to report issues or ask questions.
The following features require that a completed package release goes through a Salesforce-driven process known as the security review, which is initiated via your listing when logged into AppExchange. Unless you plan to give your package away for free, there is a charge involved in putting your package through this process.
However, the review is optional. There is nothing stopping you from distributing your package installation URL directly. However, you will not be able to benefit from the ability to list your new application on AppExchange for others to see and review. More importantly, you will also not have access to the following features to help you deploy, license, and support your application. The following is a list of the benefits you get once your package has passed the security review:
Bypass subscriber org setup limits: Limits such as the number of tabs and Custom Objects are bypassed. This means that if the subscriber org has reached its maximum number of Custom Objects, your package will still install. This feature is sometimes referred to as Aloha. Without this, your package installation may fail. You can determine whether Aloha has been enabled via the Subscriber Overview page that comes with the LMA application, which is discussed in the next section.
Licensing: You are able to utilize the Salesforce-provided License Management Application (LMA) in your LMO.
Subscriber support: With this feature, the users in the subscriber org can enable, for a specific period, a means for you to log in to their org (without exchanging passwords), reproduce issues, and enable much more detailed debug information, such as Apex stack traces. In this mode, you can also see custom settings that you have declared as protected in your package, which is useful for enabling additional debug or advanced features.
Push upgrade: Using this feature, you can automatically apply upgrades to your subscribers without their manual intervention, either directly by you or on a scheduled basis. You may use this for applying either smaller bug fixes that don't affect the Custom Objects or APIs, or for deploying full upgrades. The latter requires careful coordination and planning with your subscribers to ensure that changes and new features are adopted properly.
Tip
Salesforce asks you to perform an automated security scan of your software via a web page (http://security.force.com/security/tools/forcecom/scanner). This service can be quite slow depending on how many scans are in the queue. Another option is to obtain the Eclipse plugin from the actual vendor CheckMarx at http://www.checkmarx.com, which runs the same scan but allows you to control it locally. Finally, for the ultimate confidence as you develop your application, Salesforce can provide a license to integrate it into your Continuous Integration (CI) build system. CI is covered in the final chapter of this book.
This book focuses on building a fully native application, as such additional work involved with so-called "hybrid" applications (where parts of your application have been implemented on your own servers, for example) are not considered here. However, keep in mind that if you make any callouts to external services, Salesforce will also most likely ask you and/or the service provider to run a BURP scanner, to check for security flaws.
Make sure you plan a reasonable amount of time (at least two to three weeks, in my experience) to go through the security review process; it is essential that you initially list your package. Though if it becomes an issue, you have the option of issuing your package install URL directly to initial customers and early adopters.
It's worth taking some time to review the content and facilities in the Partner Community. Some of the key areas to take a look at are listed as follows:
Education and Trailhead: This allows you to monitor the progress of other users in your organization on Trailhead. Trailhead is Salesforce's way of learning while doing. Users read about new technologies or development approaches and are then asked to perform some challenges to validate their understanding. They are awarded badges, as part of a gamification system. Using this tab, you can see who has the most badges!
Featured Groups: This page, under More, allows you quick access to a number of Salesforce-managed Chatter groups. A key group is the Partner Alerts group, I would strongly recommend you set up an E-mail digest for this group. Only Salesforce posts to this group, so a per-post digest level is tolerable and keeps you informed without having to log in to the community.
Support: This is, of course, the place you go to raise cases with Salesforce. As you raise cases, the UI automatically attempts to search for known issues or support articles that might help answer your questions. You can also report and filter on open cases here.
Publishing: This page allows you to list your creations on the Salesforce AppExchange site. Later sections in this chapter cover this in more detail.
Partner Alerts: Partner Alerts are critical to keeping on top of changes to the service that could affect your development process and/or your customers. These might range from critical fixes, security improvements, or changes in behavior you need to be prepared for. Although rare, you may be asked to make changes to your solution by a certain deadline to ensure your users are not impacted.
There are many Chatter groups shown in the Featured Groups page in the Partner Community. Review them all and set up E-mail digests to help keep you informed without having to manually log in and check through this page each time.
Partners can use Environment Hub to create orgs for development and testing purposes. Orgs can be linked and logins managed here as well. Unlike the orgs you can get from the Salesforce Developer site, these orgs have additional user licenses. It is also possible to link your TSO and create orgs based on templates you define, allowing you to further optimize the base org configuration for your own development and testing process. For more information, review the Partner Community page detailing Environment Hub (https://partners.salesforce.com/s/education/general/Environment_Hub).