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With 2016 coming to a close, it’s time to reflect on a year of helping our clients not only launch products on the AppExchange, but also guiding them through the full lifecycle, including the plan, build/test, distribution, marketing, sales and support phases. We focus on helping SaaS companies thrive in the AppExchange ecosystem, which gives us a unique point of view. Here are our top 10 blog posts from 2016. Enjoy!
Top 5 ISV Tips
1. Reimagine Your App with Lightning – With the looming deadlines for existing / new AppExchange apps to be Lightning Ready by February / March 2017, it’s no wonder why this was a hot topic for our readers. Check out what Cliff Armstrong, Director, ISV Technical Enablement, Salesforce; Vincent Cabral, VP of Product, Nintex Drawloop; and Brian Walsh, CEO, CodeScience had to say about it at DF16.
2. QUICK GUIDE: Defining the Differences in Salesforce Lightning – It’s easy to get lost in the maze of All Things Lightning, especially when the word lightning is used interchangeably at Salesforce. This blog post gives you a quick reference guide to help you identify the flavor you’re seeking.
3. How ISV Partners Get to Scale on the AppExchange – CodeScience CEO Brian Walsh led a straight talk roundtable of executives from three successful Platinum ISV partners at DF16, including: Sean Hogan, Director of Strategic Alliances, Nintex (Drawloop); Avanish Sahai, SVP Channel and Alliances; and Chitrang Shah, VP of Products, Lattice Engines. The conversation focused on what it takes to get to scale on the AppExchange, complete with insights and best practices that accelerated sales in the last year. Here’s a summary of some of the major takeaways.
4. PODCAST: CEO Brian Walsh in Conversation SaaStr’s Jason Lemkin at DF16 – What does a SaaS startup really need to know to succeed in the AppExchange ecosystem? What are the potential pitfalls? Brian answers the hard questions, and more.
5. Planning for the Future: Roadmapping and Prioritizing post-MVP AppExchange Products – Product roadmaps are perhaps the most important thing you do as a product manager post-MVP deployment. Good roadmaps communicate the future in a compelling way to key stakeholders. Here’s a look at tools and techniques for AppExchange product roadmaps.
Top 5 Development Posts
1. QE Done Right – Automating Salesforce Application Testing Using Selenium Webdriver – This is the first of a 3 part blog series on Automating Salesforce Application Testing Using Selenium WebDriver, based on firsthand experience.
2. Six Reasons Why the Lightning Design System is Awesome from a Designer’s Perspective – The Lightning Design System is a true design framework. You understand ‘the why’ behind interface decisions from color to typography to accessibility. You have all the core tools you need to make good design decisions when creating applications to go within Salesforce.
3. Five Tips to Transition from a Visualforce Developer to a Lightning Developer – Visualforce? You’ve got that down. Now it’s time to take on Lightning. The aim of this blog post is to give you some tips that will help you to become a fearless Lightning Developer.
4. Customizing Lightning Template-Based Communities With Lightning Bolt – In this blog post we walk through some of the new Lightning interfaces and packaging capability enhancements. Community Cloud is not only an ideal platform for ISVs to innovate and build solutions, it’s a perfect collaboration product for your business to connect to your partners and customers.
5. oAuth2 Server-to-Server Authentication From Salesforce To Google APIs – How our team solved how to get Google Apps and Salesforce.com connected so that the requests could be made to the Google Calendar API.
Summary
We hope you enjoyed our blog this year. All CodeScientists are encouraged to contribute content on the topics that engage, confound, and inspire as we crack the code on thriving SaaS businesses. And there’s so much more to come for 2017. Happy New Year to you and yours from CodeScience.
Did you know that we’ve launched 220+ products on the AppExchange? We can help you.
If you are trying to launch a new product on the AppExchange, we can help you go live 3x faster. If you have an existing product, we can get new features to customers faster or get you Lightning Ready (and beyond). From simple engagements like Security Review to complex customer implementations, our team of Salesforce platform experts is here for you. Let’s talk!
