Building an application for 1 Salesforce system, for many, is an enviable position. You know the Salesforce edition you are working with and its limits and you know all the bespoke configurations that have been built into the system that you need to consider when designing the new application.

When building an ISV app you don’t know any of this.

If we continue with our example, after careful planning and development our app is looking really good, but each customer, especially the larger ones that you want to attract, will often need a highly customised their system. This adds another dimension of complexity to designing our app.

Say a customer you really want to attract has built some validation rules on the Account object or has added some mandatory custom fields. But your app doesn’t know anything about these things and when inserting a new Account an exception is thrown out. You will therefore need to be aware of this and many other such bespoke configurations in order to build a stable system that won’t be affected. Moreover, your customer may have a Salesforce edition that has lower limits, they may be using other AppExchange apps that could interfere with your app or directly affect other paid for Salesforce features causing unwanted side-effects.

All such scenarios and many more need to be considered to ensure the app design is unaffected, developed and tested.

To find out more about the challenges and the potential Pot Holes have a read of this article or contact us to find out how we would approach different challenges. Or if you want to find out how we can help email Steven.Fouracre@metacube.com