If you’re an ISV partner in the Salesforce world, you’ve no doubt noticed that there’s a lot of information for you to grok and potentially act upon, often with important dates attached. The last thing you want is to miss one of these deadlines or announcements. Luckily there’s a good way to remain informed over time: the Partner Community Chatter groups.
The Chatter groups in the Partner Community are the best way to ensure that you stay up to date, and where so much of this breaking information is disseminated and sent out via email. Here’s a rundown of the top groups that I recommend you join.
Alerts for Partners
Alerts for Partners is your absolute top group to join. Alerts for Partners is where they announce items that have a real impact on your development timeline. Inevitably these alerts come during a bad time (is there ever a good time?) and it’s best to be prepared for them. Consider having your email preferences set to “Email every post” so that you don’t miss one. Murphy’s Law says that the one you miss is the most important one.
One recurring example is the upcoming upgrade window and how it will affect you. The window between the first and last upgrade weekends for any particular upgrade, it’s important because it affects the orgs to which you can install your package. Meaning, if your packaging org gets upgraded before your test orgs, you can’t install there. Also during that same window, no new Trialforce templates can be created.
Other alerts include information about the upcoming Lightning Locker service and its impact, deprecating Chatter Answers, sandbox migrations, instance refreshes, and so much more. You and everyone on your team should belong to this group. It’s a can’t miss. And if you get a chance, thank Rajiv Patel for all of his hard work!
Partner Roadmap
Partner Roadmap is one of my favorite groups to belong to because it’s where you hear about all of the exciting new stuff from Salesforce and the ISV Team, specifically for partners. This group will alert you to all of the upcoming webinars about things like the upgrade of the Channel Order App that ISVs use to submit orders to the ISV team, certification changes, as well as changes to the Partner Program and the Community itself.
It’s important to keep in mind that partners are not allowed to share this information outside of their companies so be careful what you blog externally.
Releases for Partners
The Releases for Partners group is another fun group where Salesforce conveys information about upcoming features for the platform as a whole. This is the group that often gets me going down a rabbit-hole of documentation. I delve into juicy topics like the new Deploy Metadata from Non-certified Package Versions via Apex. Lately, it has been a deep dive into a super-cool new feature I’m very excited to get in GA: the Features Management App. This new feature allows ISVs to control and monetize features in a customer’s org directly from their License Management App. ISVs can also track activation metrics from customer orgs. I can imagine that they are both things that just about any ISV would want to leverage when available.
Security Review
Every ISV partner needs to go through Security Review and it can be a daunting and overwhelming task. The Security Review group is a good place to see threads from other partners on issues that they’ve encountered and potentially resolved regarding their reviews that could help you with your challenges. Salesforce posts regular updates on things like the new Security Source Scanner portal that lets ISVs see their scan results in one place and make comparisons with previous scans. Finally, don’t be afraid to ask your own questions! Security Review can be confusing sometimes and changes over time. Make sure that you’re clear on the path forward.
Questions & Answers – Official: Partner Community
The Official: Partner Community group is automatically added for all Community Users and is primarily for the Community team “to share news, knowledge, and best practices across our Partner Community.” One could not ask for a more knowledgeable moderator than John Richter who keeps us all up to date on the happenings around the partner ecosystem. (You might even find references to some of our other CodeScience blog posts.)
Within the Partner Community is the Questions & Answers (Q&A) group, which is fantastic for asking and answering general questions. Feel free to post your question and the 50K+ partner members and the entire Salesforce ISV team are all on deck to help you out. You’ll often encounter a CodeScientist doing the answering.
Final Thoughts
As a new or an experienced ISV Partner, successfully navigating the Salesforce ecosystem with speed can be a frustrating process. Leverage the Partner Community Chatter groups to keep one step ahead. We know from experience. CodeScience is the first Salesforce Product Development Organization (PDO) with PDO Master designation. We’ve brought over 250 products to market on the AppExchange. Our team depends on the Partner Community.
Enjoy!
