Cloud Masons | Australian Salesforce AppExchange Partner

The Rise of the Salesforce Franken-Org or Why you need a Health Check

Dave — Mon, 18 May 2020 00:06:39 +0000

Salesforce Health Check

The Rise of the FrankenOrg: How to Know Whether You Need a Salesforce Health Check

It started out as a normal Salesforce org. It didn’t stay that way
On a dark and stormy night at a company retreat, your director cackled out an idea for an addition. At the next full moon, the marketing team demanded more functionality. A sales manager, drunk on power and two bottles of reisling, screamed that he wanted a new feature, and he wanted it now.

You hired one consultant to add this feature, and another to add that. Igor—the receptionist’s hunchbacked nephew—knew how to code, so he did bits and pieces. Some consultants did a good job. Others, whether thinking about Friday beers or pressured by a deadline, took some shortcuts, or ‘smart Salesforce hacks’ as they called them. Perhaps they even gamed the test class rules. It happens.

Code, configurations and apps were stitched, glued and bolted onto your Salesforce Org over the course of years. No single person was responsible for the monster being created. Slowly, the error messages started coming in, at first every once in a while, then daily, then hourly. Your Org began to slow. New apps didn’t work. Your process builder intermittently failed.

Thunder clapped outside your office window, lightning split the night sky.

You’d created a FrankenOrg.

The rise of the FrankenOrg
FrankenOrgs are everywhere. In fact, if you don’t create a coordinated plan for building your Salesforce Org, and if you don’t give someone the responsibility for seeing that plan through, they are all but guaranteed every three to five years.

The most simple and seemingly meaningless decisions at the beginning of your Salesforce Org journey can have huge ramifications later in the piece, like hiring a slightly green consultant or innocently installing an incompatible app. But these issues breed more issues, and over time a cascade of troublesome dominoes make your Salesforce Org all but unusable.

So, how do you avoid a FrankenOrg, or overpower one that you’ve already created?

Avoiding a FrankenOrg
Your doctor is right – prevention is better than cure. If you’ve just begun your Salesforce Org journey, you’ll want to avoid creating a monster. If you’ve already gone through a FrankenOrg experience, you’ll want to ensure you never give birth to such a monster again. Remember Frankenstein II: Electric Boogaloo? Neither do I, because sequels are a really bad idea.

The most important step is to put plans in place, and make someone responsible for those plans; what goes into the org, when it goes in, and that a process is followed every time. Whoever you put in charge should know what they are doing, or get access to someone who can advise them, even if that expertise needs to be bought, like a salesforce expert who reviews your decisions and deployment plans.

The plans shouldn’t be set in stone, nor should they reach too far into the future, as your Salesforce needs will change with your organisation. Any decision should be carefully thought through, and processes should be put in place to guard against creating a Salesforce Org with a bolt through the neck.

In your quest to avoid a FrankenOrg there will be certain factors that are outside your control, including:

Admin and developer churn
With admins and developers who have stayed put for 12 months considered ‘veterans’, it’s fair to say that the Salesforce ecosystem has a high churn rate. This is caused by the high demand for skilled professionals know that they can shift to a new and often better paid position almost whenever they’d like. The result is low accountability.

While there’s nothing you can do about the high demand for professionals, there are some things you can do to mitigate its effects. If you find a quality worker, retain them by treating them as the asset they are. And when a transition happens—which it always will, no matter how many chocolates you stuff in the worker’s desk drawer—ensure that the work is properly handed over.

The ‘clicks not code’ myth
The Salesforce marketing department is perhaps too good at their job. Their ‘clicks not code’ mantra has been taken to heart by many, who see it as a licence to do everything in Salesforce with clicks alone. Unfortunately this is far from the advisable; there are cases where something can be done with clicks but really shouldn’t be, and only battle-scarred Salesforce veterans can tell the difference. Before long you find yourself hovering above an operating table yelling “it’s alive... IT’S ALIVE!!!” A true understanding of when and where Salesforce code is needed can only be gathered with experience, so a qualified, knowledgeable hire is one of the best anti-FrankenOrg investments you can make.

A true understanding of when and where Salesforce code is needed can only be gathered with experience, so a qualified, knowledgeable hire is one of the best anti-FrankenOrg investments you can make.

Repairing the damage
Perhaps it’s too late for avoidance measures. Perhaps you’ve got a train wreck of a FrankenOrg on your hands. How do you repair the damage?

Inspiration can be taken from those who deal in real life train wrecks – transport safety investigators. After a train crashes they conduct a thorough damage assessment. They go through the wreckage and identify what went wrong in order to fix it, and to ensure the same mistakes won’t happen again.

That’s exactly what a Salesforce Health Check (SHC) aims to do.

A SHC is undertaken by Salesforce professionals. The goal is to evaluate an existing org's configuration and determine its impact on reporting capabilities and business objectives. This helps answer questions like:

Why are leads not qualifying?

Why are reports not showing the right information?

Why are SLAs not being met?

Why are odd error messages popping up?

Why can we not gain any insights from our data?

Once completed, the results of the Salesforce Health Check are outlined in an inventory, presented in a user-friendly format. The document includes:

How the process was approached

An inventory of the org's configurations, apps and data

The major issues that were identified

The consequences of doing nothing (including metrics where possible)

A list of recommendations to solve the issues

The recommendations will depend on the depth of the issues at hand. If your dog walked across your keyboard and created FrankenOrg Lite, you may only need a small amount of Org remediation. If you’ve created a full strength FrankenOrg over the course of five or more years, a complete rebuild may be necessary. The decision will always be made with the business in mind—which is the most efficient and effective way to get your Salesforce Org working, and for the long term?

Why it happened, how it happened and who made it happen doesn’t matter. You’ve got a FrankenOrg, and you need to perform a de-FrankenOrg-optomy, if we can coin a (totally useless) phrase.

AdminBuddy by Cloud Masons does just that. Beginning with a Salesforce Health Check, we obtain a holistic view of your Salesforce Org, before identifying issues and their causes, and recommending ways to fix them.

Ready to turn your Org from a monster to a sleek Salesforce machine? Contact AdminBuddy now.

Want to know more about Admin Buddy?

Visit the Admin Buddy site to check out the full range of services we offer.

Got a question about Admin Buddy?

Call 0424 050 945 to speak with a real person.

The post The Rise of the Salesforce Franken-Org or Why you need a Health Check appeared first on Cloud Masons | Australian Salesforce AppExchange Partner.

5 Reasons You Need a Business Continuity Plan for Salesforce Support

Dave — Sun, 17 May 2020 22:40:05 +0000

Salesforce Health Check

5 Reasons You Need a Business Continuity Plan for Salesforce Support

How did we get here
The world’s outsourcing industry is massive, and only getting bigger. In certain countries, particularly those in Southeast Asia and the subcontinent, outsourcing is one of the biggest drivers of the economy. But as of late-March 2020, this vital source of expertise has been seriously compromised.

In India, for example, COVID-19 has resulted in a country-wide lockdown, with almost all service centres and offices closing their doors. What happens when hundreds of millions of people simultaneously try to switch to working remotely, you might wonder? The answer is chaos. Chaos happens.

This situation isn’t ideal for anyone who relies on outsourcing to meet their business needs. This is particularly the case for IT administration and support services, like those that help companies run and manage Salesforce.

Business continuity planning in uncertain times
We spun the wheel of chance and landed on global pandemic. But it could’ve been anything.

We can make an endless list of external forces that could severely impact your business. In fact, that sounds like fun, so let’s do it.

An extreme weather event like a flood, fire or cyclone destroys your office

A burst pipe or bad wiring does the same, but from the inside

A long-term power outage makes your workplace unusable

A power surge fries your equipment

A bout of sickness incapacitates half your team. You got it from Agnes, she got it from Jim…

A small meteor hits the warehouse of your biggest supplier

Your entire office gets pregnant at the same time, even the boys, like in the fascinating Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary Junior

A business continuity plan (BCP) helps to mitigate the impact that such events can have on your organisation. It is a set of guidelines designed to help your organisation weather such strife, ideally allowing you to come out the other side unharmed.

It’s never too late to put such contingencies in place. While a good business continuity plan should be capable of dealing with every event mentioned above—yes, I’m including male pregnancy—let’s instead focus our efforts on the current situation. So, handed the problem of a worldwide pandemic that not only restricts your ability to utilise your office, but that effectively neuters your outsourced workforce, what’s a Salesforce-driven company to do?

Creating a BCP for Salesforce support
Salesforce administration isn’t a skill that you can learn overnight. Experts spend years familiarising themselves with the ins and outs of the platform, becoming incredibly efficient at it all the while. Training up internal staff is certainly an option, but this is more of a long term play, and will only work for organisations who:

have the time and money to invest in training, and

have enough work to justify employing such a specialist (in which case they could hire a pre-trained worker instead).

There are many reasons to outsource Salesforce administration internationally, the chief amongst which is cost—most organisations believe that it’s more cost-effective to employ a worker in Mumbai than in Melbourne.

The truth, however, is that this may not necessarily be the case. What’s more, a situation like a global pandemic necessitates a change in perspective, however. When cutting costs is no longer an option, your focus must shift to maintaining revenue. To maintain revenue you must maintain your business operations. The number one priority for your BCP, therefore, should be to ensure that your systems are always able to operate as normal, no matter what might be happening in the world. And ideally these contingencies won’t cost an arm and a leg.

The importance of an onshore backup
Offshore outsourcing makes perfect sense, until it negatively affects your business. An onshore backup service provider is the answer.

In outsourcing your Salesforce administration to a local business, you remove the uncertainty and insecurity of international trade. Both you and your service provider are working from the same playbook—in our current pandemic situation, whatever rules apply to you also apply to them.

Outsourcing locally offers another major perk: communication. Your Salesforce support is mainly there to solve problems. When you work in the same time zone, speak the same slang, and can quickly pick up the phone or even speak face-to-face with the problem solver, these issues are fixed far more efficiently.

This fact helps to make cost less of a sticking point. Sure, you won’t get developing world rates, but you do enjoy first world service. And if you combine this efficiency with a provider that charges a pay-as-you-go rate, where you only ever pay for what you need, onshore Salesforce support begins to look less like an emergency option, and more like a shrewd way to do business.

AdminBuddy: your Salesforce BCP
AdminBuddy is one such onshore Salesforce service. Based in Australia, pay-as-you-go, and available for as little as a handful of hours at a time, AdminBuddy offers expert Salesforce support in an instant.

The solution is simple. Give us your Salesforce problems, and get on with the job of navigating your business through whatever choppy waters you might be in—whether a global pandemic or a tsunami of pregnant men.

Want to know more about Admin Buddy?

Visit the Admin Buddy site to check out the full range of services we offer.

Got a question about Admin Buddy?

Call 0424 050 945 to speak with a real person.

The post 5 Reasons You Need a Business Continuity Plan for Salesforce Support appeared first on Cloud Masons | Australian Salesforce AppExchange Partner.

5 Strategies to Support Students during Remote Learning

Dave — Sun, 17 May 2020 22:38:37 +0000

ecoSIStem Salesforce K-12 Student Management System

5 Strategies to Support Students in Distance Schooling

Distance Teaching Begins.
Coronavirus. Not since Bieber fever has a global pandemic had such an impact on schools. In much (if not most) of the world, schools are either temporarily closed, or about to be.

But, what with children being our future and all that, governments around the globe aren’t looking to shut down education altogether. Sure, school doors might be locked, but in the year 2020, a full five years after Marty McFly hoverboarded down Main Street in self-lacing Nikes, we have the technology to sidestep classrooms and quadrangles entirely.

Distance schooling will soon be the reality for many students and teachers. It’s uncharted territory for the bulk of educators, many of whom will enter this new world on nothing more than blind faith and a one hour MS Teams tutorial.

To assist the uninitiated majority who are unfamiliar with the acronym WFH, let alone actually doing their job five days a week out of their lounge rooms, let’s take a look at five strategies that will help teachers adapt to schooling at a distance.

1. Monitor student welfare
Tracking student welfare is relatively simple when all of the little tackers are sitting right in front of you, as most issues quickly become apparent in a classroom. However, swapping a room full of (mostly) smiling faces for 20 or 30 pixelated boxes makes student management a far more difficult task.

You can only deliver quality distance schooling if you have solid case management software and processes in place that are intuitive, simple, and, most importantly, continue to support positive student outcomes. You need to be able to track student welfare and issues, as well as any support needed to address those issues. You also need to be able to easily create, edit and share student management plans, so that all teachers are singing from the same hymn book.

Tracking student welfare becomes even more critical when children are locked down in potentially harmful family situations. As we’ve seen in space travel, being cut off from the world isn’t great for the mind. Many at risk children particularly in the US or UK also rely on the education system to provide them with a couple of square meals a day, so it’s vital that distance schooling doesn’t result in these kids being left behind.

2. Group students for easy learning and fun
Distance schooling makes teaching more complicated, leading to many educators focusing on the basics at the exclusion of all else. In an ideal world students would still be able to have fun at school, and by efficiently organising your students into groups, smart tech helps do just that.

Grouping your students allows them to work closely together, offering them the sort of peer-to-peer interaction that is invaluable when they’re locked indoors. Perhaps you group your students for a Friday Lunch ‘n Learn, where one group builds a volcano and another learns a song. Perhaps you create a book club, where each student takes a turn to read a page or two, and gets a bit of screen time while they’re at it. Perhaps, like this accidental hero of a boss, you run a group competition to find the funniest filter. The opportunities are endless.

A good tool will allow you to seamlessly manage multiple groups, directing them and coaching them, adding notes all the while.

3. Create firm yet flexible learning plans
As anyone who has ever worked from home will tell you, it can be difficult to lock into work mode and hit targets when the TV, the dog or your naked gardener of a neighbour is staring right at you, driving you to distraction.

Set firm goals for your students, and do all that you can to ensure that they hit them. This is all the more important if student-teacher time is severely cut back, and the kids are responsible for self-schooling most of the day. At the same time, you want to be flexible with these plans; we’re in uncharted territory, as you’ll be patently aware, so your expectations need to be adaptable. Tailor plans to the individual students where possible, and if you need to lighten their load, lighten their load.

4. Ensure your system is remotely accessible
The staff room is no more. You can’t pop by a colleague’s office. Say goodbye to the filing cabinet full of records.

Working from home is great until you realise your home hasn’t been designed to be worked from. But while you won’t be able to access the school and its equipment, it’s vital that you can at the very least access the information you need to continue to provide basic education.

A remotely accessible system grants access to that information. It represents what the IT crowd calls a ‘single source of truth’, ensuring every single teacher has the same info regarding classes and individual students. A good record will offer full visibility over each student's unique learning needs, making it as simple as possible to manage each case.

It’s important to remember that remote accessibility is just as important on the student side (in terms of the classroom at least), but with the governments loaning laptops to those in need, and focus turning to solving connectivity issues, it’s hoped that all students will gain access to the tools they need.

5. Keep up the chat with fellow teachers
Successful distance schooling isn’t just about supporting students; it’s also about supporting your fellow teachers. Your colleagues are in the exact same situation as you are—uncertain and overwhelmed—so it’s vital that you stick together during this time, albeit in a responsible physical distancing sort of way.

Use a collaboration tool to chat to the rest of the team. Make it a proxy staff room—check in on your colleagues, consult the hive mind for distance schooling tips and tricks, and share a few giggles. Just as isolation can be tough on kids, so too can it be tough on teachers, so it’s vital that your workplace remains the social outlet it always was. Perhaps organise a group call every Friday afternoon, where the team can grab a drink and and enjoy a much needed laugh.

A good tool will allow you to instant message, make voice and video calls, share files and links, and post questions on message boards.

Are you ready for distance schooling?
I can almost hear your ‘NO!’ from here. Unfortunately your levels of preparedness don’t matter. You’ll just have to do your best in challenging circumstances.

ecoSIStem is one tool that can help ease the strain. Designed for the exact challenge that COVID-19 presents, it allows educators to transition from the classroom to distance schooling in as seamless a way as possible, and offers every single feature mentioned in the list above.

The best bit? You can start your distance schooling management now with free rapid implementation!

Want to know more?

or maybe a 30-day test drive?

We can set you up with a 30-day fully operational trial version of ecoSIStem that includes preloaded data that you can use to test the functionality and evaluate against your functional requirements.*

Call 0424 050 945 today to discuss your options today

Want to know more about ecoSIStem for K-12 schools?

The post 5 Strategies to Support Students during Remote Learning appeared first on Cloud Masons | Australian Salesforce AppExchange Partner.

10 Ways Subscription Billing Can Help Your Customers during a Recession

Dave — Sun, 17 May 2020 22:36:55 +0000

ezidebit payment solution for Salesforce Sales Cloud

10 Ways Payment Plans in Salesforce Can Help You Ride Out the Recession

How did we get here
Australia was already heading for its first recession since the nineties. Then the whole country caught on fire. Then someone mingled with a bat in China. Then that person coughed on another person, who coughed on another. Then people were only allowed to leave their homes to buy an inadvisable amount of toilet paper. Before we knew it this long-predicted recession was on our doorstep, entirely ignoring physical distancing recommendations. Apart from bean farmers and toilet paper manufacturers, things aren’t looking particularly rosy for commercial enterprises right now. But while there’s no hope for a vaccine against the fast approaching recession, there does exist a prescription that may help to soothe the symptoms.

Subscription billing.
Let’s say you’re an office supply company using Salesforce. Because working remotely is so hot right now, business is good, although many of your customers aren’t doing quite so well. After choosing a $1400 home office setup, a customer asks to pay the amount off in instalments. “Not a problem,” you say, and construct a plan of $200/month over seven months, with payments taken automatically. “But how does a subscription billing tool help me in a recession?” you ask, and it’s a fair question. To understand the advantages of subscription billing, we first need to understand the ways in which a recession is bad for business.

How a recession will hurt your business
A sputtering economy makes it difficult to: Retain current customers: Less money = tighter purse strings. Unless you deal in a product that’s at the pointy end of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (we’re looking at you, toilet paper), many customers are forced to stop buying. Acquire new customers: If you can’t retain your current customers, what chance do you have to acquire new ones? Retain staff: And so the knock-on effects begin. With revenue seriously reduced, can you afford to keep your loyal workers? Chase debts: You’re owed money, but the customer can’t pay within the terms originally agreed. You’re left with no choice but to spend money - on debt collectors - to chase money. It doesn’t seem likely that something as simple as subscription billing could work to offset all of these effects. But as we’ll soon see, there are many ways in which payment plans could be your business’s most powerful weapon against a vengeful economy.

10 ways subscription billing helps you in a recession

Maintain sales and cash flow
A lump sum now, or a succession of smaller sums over the coming months? Given the recent and unprecedented volatility, you might be inclined to take the latter. Subscription billing allows you to maintain steady cash flow, keeping your business afloat even in the toughest of times, like when someone shopping for exotic meats accidentally shuts the world down.
Retain loyal staff
Steady cash flow not only keeps your business afloat, it keeps your staff employed. This could mean that you avoid difficult conversations with loyal workers, and that you’re armed with a trained, experienced workforce when things inevitably improve. Meanwhile your competitors, who laid off Tom, Dick and Harry, are forced to rebuild their team from the ground up.
Improve profit margins
Anyone who has ordered KFC to their door on a Sunday morning will know that people pay for convenience. If you offer subscription billing, you’re giving them just that. You therefore won’t need to rely as heavily on discounts and promotions to lure customers in.
Retain more customers
Recessions don’t last forever. When things pick back up, who will your customer go to: a new business, or the one they’ve been dealing with every month for the last year? As long as you offer a good service, subscription billing leads to a lower customer churn rate by granting you regular client contact.
Acquire new customers
Not only can subscription billing ensure that you retain your current customers, it can help you to recoup old ones and acquire new ones. If you’re offering a similar deal to a competitor, subscription billing could well be the gentle nudge that pushes the customer your way.
Enjoy lower defaulting
While Hollywood has done its best to make debt collection look cool, the truth is that it’s a tedious, stressful and expensive endeavour, particularly if you have to call in the professionals (who use concrete boots far less often in real life). With subscription billing, you can expect far lower defaults on payments, because you can...
Adjust payment plans on the fly
Following on from our earlier example, let’s say that our remote worker has run into financial strife after four months. $600 is still outstanding, but they currently have very little money coming in. Thankfully a subscription billing service like skedupay enables you to instantly change the terms of the agreement, so you transfer the outstanding $600 onto a new 12-month instalment plan.
Show your caring side
Corporate responsibility is in the spotlight these days. By offering subscription billing, and allowing your customers to pay for goods or services in a way that best suits them, you can demonstrate (and, just quietly, advertise) that you put the customer first.
Simplify payment management
Keeping on top of who has paid, who hasn’t, and what your cash flow is expected to be can be tricky. Not with a subscription billing service like skedupay. A simple dashboard makes management simple, and highlights any payments that need chasing.
Offer a better customer experience
The business case is clear. The customer case is almost clearer. Purchases can be converted into small, predictable, easy-to-manage payments that are spread over time. Terms can be adjusted instantly. Payments can be timed perfectly. It’s a classic win-win situation.

So what now?
A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon, then a storm ravages half of Europe. A guy makes bat stew in Wuhan, then the world economy collapses. We live in a volatile world; if you want stability, you’ll need to BYO. By converting once-off sales into long term, predictable revenue, skedupay allows you to do exactly that.

Want to know more about skedupay?

Watch skedupay in action, download a data sheet, check out some of skedupay's screens & features & learn how we can adapt it to your unique sales processes

Interested in a free 30-day trial?

Click on the tile below and head to Salesforce AppExchange to learn more about skedupay's features or sign up for a free trial today.

Got a question about skedupay?

Call 0424 050 945 to speak with a real person.

The post 10 Ways Subscription Billing Can Help Your Customers during a Recession appeared first on Cloud Masons | Australian Salesforce AppExchange Partner.

Salesforce to ezidebit payment management solution – Getting Started.

Dave — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 11:29:54 +0000

Getting Started with skedupay

What is skedupay

Recently Cloud Masons released skedupay, our Salesforce ezidebit integration. It’s a payment management solution that connects Salesforce Sales Cloud to ezidebit’s powerful payment gateway. Manage your customer’s entire billing cycle from invoice generation to transaction reconciliation with just a few clicks on any device. We are going to show you how to get started so you can:

Take Payments by credit card
Create and Manage Payment Plans/subscriptions
Manage your customers to see who has paid, who hasn’t and track money coming into your company.

So we are going to do this in 4 easy-to-follow stages.

Let's get started

Want to know more?

Call 1800 283 397 if you prefer to deal with a real person.

The post Salesforce to ezidebit payment management solution – Getting Started. appeared first on Cloud Masons | Australian Salesforce AppExchange Partner.

How we got a Salesforce App through 2 Security Reviews. First time.

Dave — Wed, 05 Feb 2020 22:57:26 +0000

ezidebit payment solution for Salesforce Sales Cloud

How we got our Salesforce App through 2 Security Reviews. 1st time.

(or How we went from OMG to WTF with skedupay)

The Catalyst
Every story always has a few things in common. Some actors. A story arc. A Journey. And a twist that no-one saw coming. Along the way, the actors discover more about the world around them and about themselves. But the thing that makes a story great over an average one is how much the actors persevere and never give up irrespective of the challenges. In the immortal words of Dale Kerrigan [The Castle], "This is out story".

Our story began in 2017 whilst we were working on a Pardot / Sales Cloud project with a client in the manufacturing sector. One of their core requirements was they needed to be able to process ezidebit payments directly inside Salesforce & it had to cover the entire life cycle from 'Opportunity - Closed Won' to 'Paid In Full'.

We figured it would be a simple case of finding an affordable solution on the Salesforce AppExchange, install it in their org, hook up their ezidebit merchant account, do some simple configuration & they would be processing payments in no time at all.

So, we set out on our journey and decided to stop by the most obvious place, Salesforce's AppExchange to find our solution. Sure, there were some solutions that were ok, but most of them were really, really expensive or they just didn't have the functionality that our customer needed.

So, it was back to First Principles. If we couldn't find a suitable pre-built solution, we would just have to build it ourselves.

The scope of the solution was simple and clear (or so we thought):
1) It had to drop straight into Salesforce Sales Cloud
2) It had to integrate seamlessly with ezidebit's payment gateway
3) It had to be intuitive and incorporate a 'mobile first' user design & experience, and;
4) It had to close the loop between 'Opportunity-Closed Won' & 'Paid in Full'

How hard could it be, right? We'd done it before and this tiny app would be a breeze.

Wrong. Very, very wrong. This is our story about how we went from "OMG!!! How are we going to pull this off" to "What the fk? Seriously?" with skedupay.

The OMG Moment
Like all AppExchange Partners, we set out with some pretty lofty goals for the app that would eventually become skedupay. But firstly, we had to design and build it conceptually before we actually built the real thing. Fortunately at that time, we had enough bandwidth to meticulously design the solution from the ground up.

We came up with some incredible functionality, we POC'ed a pretty slick user interface, and created a seamless user experience. We then gave it a right royal flogging in testing and we felt we were in a good spot to submit it for Security Review with Salesforce.

Then, almost overnight, everything changed. Lightning Ready became mandatory for all new AppExchange Apps and we finally realised that integrating Salesforce with a complex, highly secure, PCI-DSS complaint payment gateway wasn't going to be as easy and it would also require a second security review by ezidebit's Australian Security Compliance Team.

This was our "OMG Moment" and to be honest, it was the point where we were considering binning the whole project. But like all #salesforcetragics, we decided against it because taking that route would be like selling stock market shares when they hit rock bottom - it becomes a realised loss.

Instead, we put our heads down/bums up and got on with making it a reality.

The technical stuff was the (only) easy part
The first & easiest step was to make skedupay Lightning-Ready so we rebuilt every single screen and feature to make it compliant and cleaner. Yes, it was a pain, but it was worth the effort as skedupay now looks awesome and the Lightning Design System introduced some great new features that enhanced the overall user experience. In retrospect, it was a small price to pay for such a big win.

We had nailed the functionality, the code was rock solid and had good code coverage, the business logic and automation was comprehensive and the integration capabilities were holding up well under different test scenarios. For months, we were throwing different types of transactions at ezidebit's trying to break their integration API's. It was a #salesforcetragics idea of paradise. Later, we even got permission to launch a large-scale flood of requests against their API's to ensure their safety mechanisms kicked in when we needed them to. They did.

Very, very cool fun, but the (techo) party was over. Game face back on.

Setting the stage
With the app built, the code tougher than Walker - Texas Ranger, & a user interface that was slicker than Ted Bullpitt's Kingswood [Google it], it was time to find out just how well-built skedupay actually was.

It was time to submit it for security assessments by both Salesforce and ezidebit. Dual Security Reviews in other words.

Knowing what we up against, the first thing we did was very carefully bundled up skedupay into a Managed - Release 'package', which was a scary moment as there is no turning back from here.

Go take a look at the ISV Force Guide to learn about the different types of packages you can create when building apps for the Salesforce Platform. Trailhead's Build Apps as an AppExchange Partner Trail also offers a good high-level overview of the process.

It's Showtime (or Security Review * 2)**
Back to the story. We had all our [documentation] ducks in a row now and we had collated the results from the various scans and parceled up the results from our tests against ezidebit's API's.

When we hit the Submit buttons, we knew this was going to be our 'Opening Night'. It was the point where we got to find out if our apps development 'kung fu' was strong or whether we were just kidding ourselves. Guess we would find out soon enough as skedupay was now officially in the queue for Salesforce's comprehensive and very tough Security Review and ezidebit's equally rigorous PCI-DSS Compliance Review.

Our fate sealed, so we sat back that 45-degree afternoon and enjoyed some well-earned raspberry lemonades with the spare change we had left over from the application fee and awaited the call up for Security Review * 2. We didn't have to wait long.

Great. Let's do this. Butts clenched. Game faces on. We had a plan and we were ready for it this time. Rework the code, repackage the app, re-test every-bloody-thing to within an inch of its life, and re-submit it. Rinse & Repeat till we got it right.

The Results are In
After an anxious,nail-biting week, the results were in from both security assessments and our only reaction was, "WTF? Seriously?"

skedupay had been passed firs time by both Salesforce AND ezidebit.

Now, skedupay isn't our first AppExchange App. ecoSIStem, our OEM Student Administration System for K-12 schools, takes that honor, but that took 2 attempts to get it approved. However, for anyone who is not familiar with the Security Review process, nailing it first time is quite a rare achievement, but passing first time on 2 disparate technology platforms is about as hard as impeaching Donald Trump.

For a Salesforce AppExchange Partner, it is like winning the AFL/NRL Minor Rounds AND the Grand Final (on the same day in our case) and is the best outcome you could ever hope for.

The After Party
No Salesforce AppExchange partner ever expects to achieve such a remarkable result, but by the time we'd finished productising skedupay, we had:

1) A really happy client that didn't have to support a heavily customised payment management solution or complex integration services with ezidebit. Our client just installed skedupay, connected it to their ezidebit Merchant Account & started processing payments that day

2) Built a powerful ezidebit payment management solution for Salesforce Sales Cloud that was generic enough to support invoicing and billing across both B2B and B2C business models & virtually every industry sector, and;

3) Established our little company as one of the most capable Salesforce AppExchange Partners in Australia.

Epilogue - Would we do it again?
Short answer: Hell yes.

Long Answer: As complete #salesforcetragics, we love building innovative and cool apps for the Salesforce Platform. Its addictive and financially rewarding. Sure, not every app will be get you into #lambos and #tothemoon, but the more apps you make, the more likely you are to hit upon a winner and the process DOES get easier each time. That's why we won't stop making apps that help customers succeed on the Salesforce Platform.

And that is our story about how we got our Salesforce app through 2 Security Reviews. First Time. Or how we went from OMG to WTF with skedupay.

Thank you for reading.

Want to know more about skedupay?

Watch skedupay in action, download a data sheet, check out some of skedupay's screens & features & learn how we can adapt it to your unique sales processes

Interested in a free 30-day trial?

Head to Salesforce AppExchange to learn more about skedupay's features or sign up for a free trial today.

Got a question about skedupay?

Call 0424 050 945 to speak with a real person.

The post How we got a Salesforce App through 2 Security Reviews. First time. appeared first on Cloud Masons | Australian Salesforce AppExchange Partner.