New Feature Lets AppExchange Developers Login To Clients’ Organizations To Help Troubleshoot

Back with the Spring ‘11 release of the Salesforce.com platform, there was a new feature added in beta mode that allows AppExchange developers the ability to log in to a customer’s organization to aid in the troubleshooting process.

This isn’t breaking news, but I figured I would write about it anyway because it can be very useful if you’re an app developer for the Salesforce platform. We’ve developed some applications for the AppExchange in the past, and one of the hardest and most time-consuming problems is having to go back and forth with the clients to try and figure out the root of the problem without being able to see anything. The other option is of course a web conference, but those require finding time for both parties to meet and review, which can be a challenge with distant time zones.

Package Support Access gives you the ability to log into the client’s org and access the setup areas for the application in a read-only mode. This can help to resolve a lot of issues as initial setup and configuration is the primary area where things go wrong with managed packages. Unfortunately, this feature does not grant access to any data, so if your application is very data dependent, you will still need to work through the client to address those issues. I understand why they can’t grant access to any of the data, but in some of our applications, data is the primary cause of issues.

In order to set this up for your application, you will need to have your package registered with a License Management Organization (LMA), and then you will need to open a case through the Partner Portal with Salesforce Support to activate the feature for your application. After that, a client can grant access to you just like they do for Salesforce Support in the setup area.

I think this is a pretty cool new feature for application developers on the Force.com platform that didn’t get much publicity. For full details, take a look at page 63 of the release notes for the Spring ‘11 release.