In a recent blog post, Choose the Right Salesforce Org for the Right Job, we discussed the different types of orgs and how they should be used within developer operations (DevOps), from production to sandbox, scratch, and Developer Edition orgs, along with the differences between them and where they are used. We also briefly touched on Trailhead playgrounds, trials, and pre-release orgs.

While all the information is still valid, it specifically addresses orgs available to customers. As an ISV partner, you will still use these orgs, but there are some additional orgs that partners have access to as a benefit of the ISV Partner Program, enabling you to develop and test apps, demo them to your customers, and run your business. This post will give you a brief overview of the different ISV-specific orgs, and you will find more information in the Resources section.

Partner Business Org (PBO)

The Partner Business Org (PBO) is a free production org that is provisioned for ISVs. This is where you will run your partner business. It includes the License Management Application (LMA), Channel Order Application (COA), and it is where you enable Dev Hub and Second-generation managed packaging (2GP).

Scratch Orgs for ISVs

Scratch orgs do the heavy lifting for ISV development. While the previous post talked about scratch orgs in general, it is important to understand where they fit into the ISV development lifecycle. Scratch orgs can be namespaced or non-namespaced:

• Use namespaced scratch orgs for development. The namespace prevents issues in packaging metadata later on.
• Use non-namespaced scratch orgs for testing package installation and upgrade, and for automated testing, CI/CD, and other forms of testing to the degree possible in a short-lived org (30 days max, no extensions).

To learn more about scratch orgs and why we recommend them see the Scratch org docs.

Environment Hub

The PBO also includes the Environment Hub (EH or EnvHub), which allows you to provision orgs for development, testing, and demos.

You can get to the EnvHub by searching for Environment Hub from the App Launcher. Although it doesn’t belong to an app by default, you can add it to one since you do own the PBO.

Once you are in the EnvHub, you can see orgs already provisioned.

Behind the scenes, this is just a Salesforce Object Hub Member. You can select fields to display or add your own. This is really useful to ensure that you are aware of org expiration dates. In fact, you can create a Salesforce Flow to notify your team when orgs are about to expire.

From here, you can connect existing orgs or create new orgs. We’ll talk about developer orgs in the next section.

Partner Developer Edition orgs (PDEs)

As mentioned earlier, scratch orgs are where ISV development should take place. But for rare use cases where you are running experiments that require the same org to last longer than 30 days (and can’t just use a series of identical scratch orgs), you should create a Partner Development Edition Org (PDE) instead of a regular Developer Edition (DE) org. The reason for this is that a PDE has higher org limits than a DE (see resources below). For instance, you get 20 Salesforce licenses and 2050 MB of storage on a PDE versus two licenses and 20 MB on a DE.

You will use a PDE org as a namespace org for 2GP, or historically, as a packaging org for first-generation packaging (1GP). We strongly recommend 2GP for any new packages you create, therefore we don’t recommend creating new 1GP packaging orgs. To learn more, see this Trailhead module on 2GP.

You will also provision a PDE for Trialforce, which we’ll talk about below.

Test /demo orgs

In addition to development orgs, as an ISV partner, you can use Environment Hub to create test/demo orgs for testing your solution, and to demo your app in an org that can represent your customers’ environment. Select a Standard Edition from the dropdown options, or use a Trialforce Template ID with customizations you’ve preconfigured. These orgs have a default expiry of one year and can be extended by submitting a case. You can also raise a case to request for increasing the org limits (e.g., additional storage or API calls), or additional features and licenses (e.g., Event Monitoring, Change Data Capture) to be added for testing and demo purposes.

Trialforce (and all the associated orgs)

Trialforce is a framework that allows you to setup trial templates and provision trials (or allow prospects to provision).

There are a lot of TLAs (three-letter acronyms) within Trialforce, including:

• TMO – Trialforce Management Org: This allows you to create TSOs with a branded login page and welcome emails
• TSO – Trialforce Source Org: This is where you install your solution and any sample data

You create a PDE from Environment Hub and then log a case with Partner Support to get it enabled as a TMO.

In EnvHub, you create the TSO directly. Once you have the trial template created on the TSO, you can use that template ID, to create trials in EnvHub.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are some different orgs that you, as an ISV partner, would use as part of the development, test, and production demo lifecycle.

Further Resources

• Trailhead: Tools and Resources for AppExchange Partners
• Scratch org features
• Benefits of Partner Developer Orgs
• ISVGuide: Manage Orgs with Environment Hub
• ISVGuide: Deliver Trials on AppExchange with Trialforce

About the authors

Peter Martin is a Director, GTP Technical Evangelist at Salesforce. He has been involved in the Salesforce ecosystem since 2007 and has been with the ISV enablement team since 2017.

Jerry Huang is a Director, GTP Technical Evangelist at Salesforce. He is passionate about building apps, and starting and scaling great businesses on AppExchange. Jerry has been in tech for over two decades. He has 30 Salesforce certifications, including the Salesforce Certified Technical Architect, and an approved U.S. patent.