4 Reasons Why AppExchange is More Powerful than ever Before!

Salesforce AppExchange, the #1 cloud marketplace, is a proven ecosystem of apps with millions of installs and thousands of customer reviews to help you find the best match for your business. As of 24th Oct 2017, Salesforce went for a complete revamp of the AppExchange UI. What this essentially means is that while AppExchange just a Marketplace for Applications earlier, which then went on to list Components too, it now lists Lightning Data and Lightning Bolt as well!

1. Salesforce Welcomes New members to the AppExchange Family

Salesforce has added 2 new members to the AppExchange family: Lightning Data and Lightning Bolt.

Lightning Data gives access to specialized data set which customers can buy, leading to a definite boost for their Sales and Marketing teams with pre-integrated, approved and scalable data solutions.

Lightning Bolt Solutions allow Partners to publish pre-built templates which can be used by customers to create next-gen communities and portals.

2. Everything is just 2 clicks Away!

The Salesforce UX team has worked really hard to make customers’ life easy. Earlier, users needed to click a minimum of 3-4 clicks for getting information about the App provider. Now, everything is just 2 clicks away, with  all the required information about the Application and App vendor available on a single tab, with reviews moved to a separate tab.

Application Listing Old UI

Application Listing New UI

3. A Smarter Search

In another good example of UX, AppExchange now saves your recent search items to make it available for later use, helping the customers who may have searched for a lot of applications.

4. Salesforce’s other Marketplaces are also under same umbrella

Earlier, Salesforce had different Marketplaces for Heroku elements, Marketing Cloud apps and so on. With the recent revamp, you can find other apps like Heroku elements, HubExchange (Marketplace for Marketing cloud applications), Link Marketplace (Marketplace for eCommerce Solutions) on the same integrated platform called AppExchange.

Salesforce has taken cognizance of all customer pain points and turned AppExchange into an all-encompassing, powerful and customer-oriented Marketplace. A detailed description of all new AppExchange features can be found here.

Written by Purushottam Bhaigade, Technical Lead at Eternus Solutions

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AppExchange 2.0 Secrets Unleashed for Salesforce Partners

Had Marc Benioff not gifted the phrase “App Store” to his mentor and friend, the late Steve Jobs, the AppExchange would have been known as the Salesforce App Store today.

With 4000+ solutions, 5 million+ app installs and 87% of Salesforce customers using AppExchange apps, the 2005 born, 11-year-old AppExchange has come a long way from merely being an apps listing service to a powerful community of business apps, customers and partners. Its recent makeover unveiled on 24th Oct, 2017, therefore, is nothing short of a rebirth, making it 'The AppExchange 2.0'.

The Salesforce partner ecosystem is one of the pillars and the largest contributors fueling the Salesforce economy, which is forecasted by IDC to drive 3.3 million jobs and in excess of $859 billion in revenue by 2022. Hence, awareness of how this Appexchange makeover empowers Salesforce Partners by marrying their interests, is of essence.

Defining App USPs Was Never Significant Than Now

Powered with an intelligent search which recommends all the relevant and similar apps to the customers, the new Appexchange provides them with a la carte menu of apps to choose from in a particular category. For e.g. when I search the term “documents”, the search results consist of all relevant apps, consultants, industry solutions around document generation or a similar feature.

This makes it imperative that ISV partners clearly define their application’s unique selling point, from that of your competitors, thus enabling customers to make informed buying decisions.

Tighten Loose Industry Specific Nuts With Lightning BOLTS

With Lightning Bolts, ISV Partners now have the power to package industry specific process flows, apps and lightning components as predefined solution templates, leading to faster deployments and go to market, without having to reinvent the wheel. A great example of this is a promotion management and communications Lightning Bolt solution for the Retail sector offered by Appirio.

This enables ISV Partners to carve their niche within an industry vertical, and helps them emerge and be recognized as industry leaders rather than just application providers.

Brand Your Product And Industry Expertise

AppExchange 2.0 brings in two important perspectives of categorizing solutions with their relevance to industry vertical using Industry collections, and with relevance to a specific Salesforce product using Product Collections. This provides Salesforce Partners, with an opportunity of being recognized as not only an expert in the relevant industry vertical, but also, in a respective Salesforce product umbrella.

For e.g. Product collections for Sales Cloud provides solutions addressing A to Z needs of the sales process, starting from unlocking sales channel to driving sales rep productivity.

Shorter Application Issue Resolution Cycles

Dealing with technically aware and well informed customers is a dream come true for product support reps and AppExchange 2.0 has made this a reality. AppExchange 2.0 not only provides a wide array of apps to thee Application users to choose from, but also goes a step ahead and empowers them through recommendations of relevant and applicable Trailhead self-learning modules.

This inevitably results in a smarter and cognizant generation of application users along with shortened issue resolution cycles.

Show Them The Money

Business plans sculpt the blue print of your apps by pushing Salesforce partners to ponder over key aspects such as target audience, potential revenue forecast, customer pipeline etc. thus enabling you to build an awesome business app.

As it is rightly said “Don’t just build a product, build a business around a solution that solves business problems” and staying true to this, AppExchange 2.0 empowers partners to not just think about the application architecture and design, but also a sustainable long term business plan, blending it beautifully within the listing setup of the Partner Community.

Last but not the least, the Appexchange makeover is a force to reckon with, which complemented with the powerful partner ecosystem, will prove a game changer in times to come.




Written by Jigar Shah, Enterprise Solution Architect at Eternus Solutions

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Understanding – Time to First Byte

Introduction

I faced slow website loading in a project and I am sure many of you must have faced the same. Now-a-days, people are worried about responsiveness of web server and speed of their websites. There are many reasons as to why your website might be slow! Typically, the most common reasons are inappropriate hardware configuration, incorrect coding practises, slow internet connection and so on. Apart from these, there is an overlooked but highly important factor that degrades the performance of your site and that is TTFB - Time to First Byte.

What is TTFB?

TTFB – Time To First Byte, is a metric to measure responsiveness of web server and speed of website. In simpler words, it is the time any browser has to wait for the first byte to be received. TTFB is not the only metric to measure the speed of your site. In spite of this it cannot be overlooked.

Organizations make use of TTFB to identify the weak points like speed of their website when they make http request. By identifying the weak points, they know whether it is a server configuration issue or an application issue etc.

Following is the illustration of TTFB seen in Chrome Developer Tools. There are also various other components in the image below starting sequentially is Request Sent, TTFB and Content Download of the website.

The Request sent to the server took 0.16 ms which is acceptable. Then there is a waiting time for the content to be downloaded. This waiting time is TTFB where we receive the first byte of the response. So TTFB is the first thing that we have received before the content is downloaded and TTFB for current site request is 2.85 seconds which is huge. Finally, the content of website like CSS, images and scripts and so on, are downloaded in 8.55 ms which is also acceptable. So we can easily understand from the image below that TTFB is the first byte that we receive even before the content is downloaded.

Tools for Testing TTFB

There are various tools available online to test the performance of your site. Testing the performance of your site is indirectly, nothing but measuring TTFB. Following are the free tools you can use to measure TTFB of your site:-

1. WebPageTest
2. Google Chrome – Developer Tools (this is recommended as it is default integrated with Google Chrome Browser)
3. Pingdom
4. KeyCDN

TTFB Impacted by/Causes of High TTFB

TTFB is impacted by many factors, there are reasons as to why your TTFB is high. Following are some of those reasons:-

1. Server Configuration
The first thing that hits us is inappropriate server configuration. Off course, inappropriate server configuration is one of the major reasons to high TTFB. If your server configuration is inappropriate it will affect the performance of your site. It can make the processing of any request slow which will in turn result in high TTFB and the performance of your site will degrade.

2. High CPU Usage
Even if your server configuration is good your site might perform slow. Reasons to high TTFB are innumerable, one of which is High CPU Usage. If the CPU usage of your server is high it might degrade the performance of your site. Your server will not be able to process your requests quickly.

3. Slow Database Request
Slow Database Request is also one main reason for slow performance of your site. If your database is not structured well(indexes) or your query is not well-formed, then it will for sure add some delay in execution and will result in slower performance of your site.

4. Inefficient code on server
One of the main reason for slow performance of your site is inefficient code. Inefficient code will slow down the execution of your application and also will ultimately increase the CPU usage which will result in slow performance of your site. So, it is recommended that you always use best coding practises for your application.

Effect of TTFB

TTFB strongly affects the search ranking of your site. If TTFB of your site is high then it will affect the ranking of your site by not listing it at the top when searched. So the ranking of your site is directly linked to TTFB of your site. Though TTFB is not the only metric of low ranking of your site, however, it plays a major role in ranking of your site.

Improving TTFB

Improving TTFB can greatly help you increase the performance and speed of your site. Improving TTFB is nothing but reducing the TTFB number i.e. if the TTFB of your site is 4 seconds then you can improve TTFB of your site to 1 second. Following are the ways you can improve TTFB of your site:-

1. Improve your server configuration

Good server configuration can ultimately increase the speed of your site. It will automatically perform faster in serving end user’s request and also can speed your database queries and application processing. You can add a load balancer to improve the performance of your site. Load balancer balances the requests received by end user when actual server is running out of memory. Your load balancer server will just perform like your actual server.

2. Implementing CDN

A CDN is a spread over network which delivers html pages and other web contents from the server to end user based on their geographical locations, the origin of the web page and content delivery server. Implementing a CDN is a really good idea to improvise the performance of your site. Fetching everything from your hosting server over the network can cause latency and will reduce the performance of your site. Thus implementing a CDN will really be helpful if the request is from where the CDN server is present and will not cause any network latency. Ultimately improving the performance of your site.

3. Caching 

Caching is a process of temporarily storing the data you request in cache. For example, the files you automatically request by looking at a Web page are stored on your hard disk in a cache subdirectory under the directory for your browser. When you return to a page you've recently looked at, the browser can get those files from the cache rather than the original server, saving you time and saving the network the burden of additional traffic. Caching is a good technique to increase the performance of your site. It is mainly used for static content of your site. It will also reduce the network latency of your requests, thus increasing the speed and performance of the website.

Conclusion

TTFB is an important metric in measuring the performance of your site. Above mentioned measures to improve TTFB are fairly simple to implement. A TTFB time of 500 ms or less is recommended.

Written by Rohit Sevaramani, Tech Lead (MCP) at Eternus Solutions

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