Overview of Trialforce

A Trialforce setup consists of several parts, configured at different times. It’s important to understand these parts and the relationship between them before you start using Trialforce.

Trialforce Management Organization (TMO)

This is the starting point for setting up Trialforce and the central location for managing Trialforce after it’s set up. You must file a case in the Partner Community to receive your TMO. The two tasks you perform in the TMO are: create Trialforce source organizations and define templates for custom branding.

Trialforce Source Organization (TSO)

This organization is used to create a template for the trial orgs received by your customers. You create this from your TMO. The tasks you perform in a TSO are: install your app, along with any sample data; specify branding by choosing from the templates you created previously in the TMO; configure the TSO to be exactly as you want your customers to experience it; and generate a Trialforce template, which becomes the basis for all trial organizations.

Trialforce Template

This is a snapshot or exact copy of your TSO at a specific instance in time. You create this from a TSO after you’ve installed your app and made any configuration changes. The Trialforce template is specified in the HTML page from which customers sign up for trials, and defines the trial organization that gets provisioned each time a customer signs up.

HTML Signup Form

This is an HTML form that serves as the registration page on your website from which customers sign up for trials. You must file a case in the Partner Community to get this form, and then customize it with your company details. It is associated with the Trialforce template you plan to use for trials. This ensures that each time a customer signs up for a trial on your website, they receive an organization that is an exact copy of your chosen Trialforce template.

Relationship between organizations used to set up Trialforce

The TMO, TSOs, and Trialforce templates have a hierarchical relationship, as illustrated above.

• You can create multiple TSOs from a given TMO. For example, if you want to offer trials for two different apps, you would generate two different TSOs from the same TMO, one for each app. This enables you to use the TMO as a central hub to manage the trials for all Force.com apps produced by your company.
• You can create multiple Trialforce templates from the same TSO. For example, if you release a new version of your app after you’ve started using Trialforce, you can install the upgraded version into the previous TSO, and then generate a new Trialforce template from it. If you then update your HTML signup form to point to the new Trialforce template, all trial organizations created subsequently will automatically have the new version of the package.

As a best practice, we recommend you have one unique TMO for your company, one TSO for each app, and one Trialforce template for each version or edition of an app. Splitting up the configuration process across these different levels makes it easier to maintain and update your trials. This is because each time you need to change something, such as the version of an app, its branding, or a configuration detail of the trial organization, you only need to make the change at one level in the hierarchy. This minimizes the configuration steps involved and makes it easy to concurrently manage trials for multiple products, versions, and editions.