As an ISV in the partner program, you’ve built an app that leverages the Salesforce1 Platform. Once you’ve sold your app to a customer, you need to ensure the customer has the right Salesforce1 Platform licenses and features to use your app. You do this by submitting a service order to Salesforce using the Channel Order App (COA), which is provided for free to ISV partners.
The process of submitting an order can often be confusing and very manual. In this blog post we’ll share best practices about how you can automate the process so you can get customers live more efficiently.
ISV Business Org
The ISV Business Org is perhaps the most critical component. The ISV Business Org is the org you use to run all business operations, including sales, support, marketing, and operations. It is where you have CRM in addition to ISV Platform Technologies like the License Management App (LMA) and Channel Order App (COA). It’s important to combine the ISV Platform Technologies in the same org to get the most value out of these tools and for this automation to work.
Understanding Service Orders
Let’s break down the order entry screen in the Channel Order App and look at the key pieces of information needed:
1. The first section is for customer information, which you should already have from the customer’s Account record in your CRM. The only additional field is the Org ID, which is where your customer has installed your app. You can get this from the corresponding license record in the LMA.
Once you collect this information it is stored in the Customer object of the COA.
2. The other key section is for Order Details – or details on what you sold the customer: what licenses, how many, and for what price. This information should be captured on the Opportunity.
This information is stored in the Order and Order Detail objects of the COA.
Automating the Process
As you can see, the COA is asking for information about the customer and what products you sold to them. Hopefully it’s clear that most, if not all, of this information should be captured in the process of working a deal. So this information should already exist in your ISV Business Org. Instead of re-entering all this information on the order entry screen, why not automate the process?
Here’s how you can collect data from various sources in the ISV Business Org and populate the Customer, Order, and Order Detail objects:
The key to making all this work is having all the ISV Platform Technologies configured in the ISV Business Org and maintaining data integrity. Your app must also have a managed package that is linked to the LMA.
COA Automation Package
We’ve implemented this automation using Visual Workflow (Flow). We used Flow because it is easy to customize without having to write code. To get you started, we’ve put this Flow in an unmanaged package that you can install in your ISV Business Org.
Have a look at the getting started guide below for the package link. Please note that the LMA and COA must be installed in your ISV Business Org. This is a sample implementation and it needs to be further refined to meet your unique business processes and to create valid orders. For example, you need to make sure the Flow is pulling the right data from your ISV Business Org.
Update: new package available here , please disregard the listing mentioned in the cheat sheet.
Next Steps
It’s easy to get started now! For more best practices, tips, and a live demo of all these tools in action, please watch this Dreamforce session recording: Manage Your Business with ISV Platform Technologies and the ISV Business Org.
And have a look at this cheat sheet that you can use to get started: Manage Your Business with ISV Platform Technologies.
Special thanks to Sebastiano Costanzo from the ISV Technical Enablement team and Jen Luna from Intuit for helping pull this together.