Several Salesforce organizations are required to develop and test your application. Salesforce DX allows you to manage many of these organizations, though, in due course, as your relationship with Salesforce becomes more formal, you will have the option of accessing their Partner Portal website to create organizations of different types and capabilities. We will discuss this in more detail later.
It's a good idea to have some kind of naming convention to keep track of the different organizations and logins. As stated earlier, these organizations will be used only for the purposes of learning and exploring in this book:
Username |
Usage |
Purpose |
Namespace |
In this org, we will define a unique identifier for our application, called a namespace. You can think of this as a web domain as it is also unique to your application across the Salesforce service. Create this org at https://developer.salesforce.com/. |
|
Salesforce DX |
Salesforce DX requires you to first connect to an org known as the Dev Hub. This org helps Salesforce and you to co-ordinate all the orgs you need for development and testing purposes. I recommend that, for this book, you use the free 30-day trial available at https://developer.salesforce.com/promotions/orgs/dx-signup. |
The following are other organization types that you will eventually need in order to manage the publication and licensing of your application. However, they are not needed to complete the chapters in this book:
Usage |
Purpose |
Production/CRM Org |
Your organization may already be using this org to manage contacts, leads, opportunities, cases, and other CRM objects. Make sure that you have the complete authority to make changes, if any, to this org since this is where you run your business. If you do not have such an org, you can request one via the Partner Program website described later in this chapter by requesting (via a case) a CRM ISV org. Even if you choose to not fully adopt Salesforce for this part of your business, this type of org is still required when it comes to utilizing the licensing aspects of the platform. Eventually, when you are ready to develop your package for real, this org will also become your Salesforce DX Dev Hub. For this book, we will use a temporary Dev Hub org as described earlier. |
AppExchange Publishing Org (APO) |
This org is used to manage your use of AppExchange. We will discuss this in the Introduction to AppExchange and listings section later in this chapter. This org is actually the same Salesforce org you designate as your production org and is where you conduct your sales and support activities from. |
License Management Org (LMO) |
Within this organization, you can track who installs your application (as leads), the licenses you grant them, and for how long. It is recommended that this is the same org as the APO described earlier. |
Trialforce Management Org (TMO) and Trialforce Source Org (TSO) |
Trialforce is a way to provide orgs with your preconfigured application data so that prospective customers can try out your application before buying it. It will be discussed later in this chapter. |