Salesforce has rolled out new development tools, an expedited security review process, and new marketing benefits for app makers in its partner program.
The announcements came at the online CRM vendor’s Dreamforce user event, which opened today near its San Francisco headquarters at the Moscone Convention Center. Collectively, they’re aimed at helping app writers build, list, and sell products in Salesforce’s AppExchange marketplace more easily.
The new development environment, named Salesforce DX, is designed to align with the DevOps-inspired continuous integration and delivery models coders are adopting in rapidly expanding numbers, while a new Security Review FastTrack process offers pre-screening assistance to app writers that can shorten the security approval process for new programs.
To help developers promote their offerings more effectively, meanwhile, Salesforce has added the ability to find and install apps from directly within its “Customer Success Platform” interface, and equipped the nextlevel app locator used by its internal sales team with new filtering capabilities that make identifying appropriate solutions for Salesforce customers easier.
In addition, Salesforce revealed that creators of solutions for the Salesforce1 mobile app will have the ability to add their own branding to those systems and list them independently in mobile app stores via a new tool named My Salesforce1. Currently being piloted, that offering is expected to become generally available to developers—for an additional fee—in the second half of 2017.
Other partner program enhancements introduced today include the addition to Salesforce’s Trailhead self-guided learning environment of a new “Superbadge” for users of the company’s Lightning design and development platform and new certifications for system and application architects.
“Salesforce’s born-in-the-cloud partner ecosystem is rapidly growing and changing—partner types are morphing together, new app categories like Lightning components are emerging and partners are increasingly leading digital transformation initiatives with customers,” said Tyler Prince, Salesforce’s executive vice president for alliances and go-to-market Innovation, in a press statement. “With these new enhancements to the Salesforce Partner Program announced today, we hope to continue providing our partners with the right tools and resources to grow, thrive and drive customer success.”
Salesforce unveiled enhancements to the Quip productivity solutions it acquired in August today as well. End users can now create Quip documents from within Salesforce applications and equip those documents to display dynamically updated information from their solution database about customers, opportunities, and more. Users can also now sign in to Quip via the same login credentials they use to access other Salesforce systems.
Dreamforce is expected to draw over 171,000 attendees and more than 15 million online viewers between today and Friday, when the event closes.
