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Force.com is the world's first Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), enabling Developers and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to create any kind of business application, entirely in the cloud. As a result, thousands of developers and ISVs have created hundreds of commercial enterprise application with Force.com. Today, many of these applications are listed and deployed through the AppExchange.

The AppExchange has made it very easy to showcase what you have built and market to our existing Salesforce CRM customers. The value the AppExchange brings to ISVs is a growing economy of current Salesforce customers looking to enhance their existing Salesforce CRM organization (org). And because the customer already has a license of one of the Salesforce CRM Editions, they can easily test drive and install your app into their Salesforce org. In fact, we recommend you publish your Force.com app to the AppExchange to sell into our existing customer base.

But what if you want to market and distribute to customers who don’t have Salesforce CRM? What if you wanted to offer a free trial of your app to a user who doesn’t even know what Salesforce is? As Force.com has matured over the years, we are seeing more and more non-CRM apps. These are apps that do not extend Salesforce CRM and have no need to leverage Salesforce standard objects like Leads, Opportunities, Cases and the like. ISVs that have developed these non-CRM apps can market to any customers; ultimately increasing their market reach. An ISV that develops a Force.com app without any CRM, can run this app on our Force.com Edition. For apps like these, a new distribution model was needed.

Introducing Trialforce! Trialforce provides a simple and straight-forward process to provision free trials and deploy your Force.com app from your own website, or any site for that matter. With Trialforce, any Force.com ISV can expand their distribution channel and market reach outside the Salesforce CRM community.

Why use Trialforce?

Salesforce.com partners span a diverse set of industries and business disciplines ranging from consulting services, human resources, sales methodology, marketing optimization, finance, mortgage lending and others, which have all responded enthusiastically to Trialforce. It is not uncommon for a partner to more than double their leads when using Trialforce and AppExchange. Just some of the benefits you will receive as a Trialforce user:

• Harness developer.force.com’s powerful and easy-to-use tools to reduce development time
• Customize your application, including functionality, design, data and trial experience
• Maximize the distribution of your applications
• Run your own marketing campaigns to maximize customer reach and adoption
• Establish the optimal financial relationship between you and your customer to maximize ROI

How does Trialforce work?

The idea is simple. A prospect will come to your site to learn about your Force.com app. After reviewing relevant product marketing materials, your prospect will click a link for a free trial (Figure 1). The prospect will complete the registration page (we will provide you with a customizable registration page) and click Submit to initiate the provision process.

Figure 1: Offer a Free Trial link from your webpage

Your trial registration page will be tied to a template of your Trialforce Master Organization (TMO). When your prospect clicks submit from your registration form, the form will submit a request to salesforce.com provisioning servers, and the servers will automatically provision a copy of the template as a brand new org for your prospect. Your prospect now has a free trial of your Force.com app with everything customized and ready to go!

It is highly recommended that you package your Force.com app as a Managed Package. There are two primary benefits when using a Managed Package. The first is that Managed Packages can be upgraded. This means if you plan to release new versions of your Force.com app, you can easily provide your existing customers with a link to the new package version. Your customer can simply click the new install link (provided by you) and upgrade to the newer version while maintaining any customizations they have made.

The second benefit is that Managed Packages can be associated with the License Management App (LMA). This way the signups will be considered as licensed installs that can be tracked in your LMA. With the LMA installed in your production Salesforce CRM org, you can see more details about the prospect, manage the trial and activate the license once paid.

Why are Free Trials important?

Everyone likes to try before they buy, and free trials are one of the best ways to facilitate this. Free trials provide instant access to your app with all the functionality and data you deem appropriate. Your prospect can then start using your app and instantly see the value add.

With Trialforce, you can be very creative with your trials. Not only can you have your Force.com app all configured and ready to go, but you can have sample relevant data included allowing the real benefits to surface from the moment your prospects logins.

How to Get Started with Trialforce?

Below are the steps to get started with Trialforce.

1. Build your Force.com app

It all begins with your Force.com app. You've probably already done this, but you will need to develop your Force.com app using a free Partner Developer Edition org available on the Partner Portal.

2. Create your Managed Package

After you have developed your Force.com app, you will want to package it. Packages are like virtual suitcases that contain the various components and customizations that make up your application. You can upload a Managed Package in one of two states: Beta or Released. It’s very important to test your Managed Package in a Beta state first before uploading it in the Released state. Beta Managed Packages can be modified if changes are required. Once you set your Managed Package to Released status, certain components of your Managed Package become locked down. By locking these components down, you will be able to upgrade them in the future.

Once you have completed your testing, you will want to package your Force.com app as a Managed Package in a Release state. This will allow you to provide seamless upgrades for your customers, manage their trials and track their installs via the License Management Application (LMA).

Check out the How to Create and Register a Package step-by-step guide for more information.

3. Submit your Package for Security Review

All applications enrolled in the AppExchange Partner Program must go through a periodic security review. The Security Review has been developed to assess the security posture of partner organizations, and to ensure that all applications published on the AppExchange follow industry best practices for security standards. Click here to learn more on how to submit your application for security review.

4. Create your License Management Org (LMO)

Your License Management Org is where you will manage your customers' access to your application. You should install the License Management Application in to your existing Salesforce CRM org (Enterprise Edition is required). If you don't already have a Salesforce CRM org, eligible partners should log in to the Partner Portal and create a Case in the "OEM > Request CRM for Partner" category.

5. Associate your Managed Package to a License Management Org (LMO)

This step is important. It insures that every time someone creates a Trial of your application, your License Management Org receives the updated records. To associate your Managed Package to your License Management Org, you will need to log in to the AppExchange. To associate the package with your LMO, you need to log in to the AppExchange with your partner developer username, and go to Publishing | Your Uploaded Packages | Manage Licenses (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Associating package version with LMO from AppExchange

6. Configure your Default License Values on the AppExchange

Even if you're not going to be distributing your Managed Package via the AppExchange, you will need to register your package on the AppExchange because the AppExchange is where you specify the default license values for your Managed Package.

You should get in the habit of registering your package every time you upload a new version of your managed package, and especially when you install a new version of your managed package in to you Trialforce Master org. To register your new package version, please see figure 2 above.

7. Preparing the Trial experience - Trialforce Management Org; Trialforce Master Org and Signup Form

Next, you will need to request your Trialforce Management Org. This org will contain the Trialforce Management Console, allowing you to create your Master Org, Email branding, and Branded Login Page. To receive your Trialforce Management Org, please log a Case from the partner portal under the Category "Trialforce" and sub-category "Request for Trialforce Management Org".

Eligible partners should log a case to receive an HTML registration page (Category: "Trialforce", sub-category: "Request for Formname"). This page is just a template though, and you must modify it. First - you will need to update variables and hidden elements throughout the sample code. Search the source for commented items marked TODO and replace them with the appropriate values. You should modify the HTML and CSS to match the look and layout of your website (note: you can still move forward to the next steps without changing the look and feel of the registration page). You should be sure not remove any of the form elements.

Now you can test if the registration page is able to make a request to salesforce.com servers. This test will provide you a generic Force.com org that will expire in 2 days. Please note that this org will not contain your application because you have not completed the rest of the steps.

8. Create and customize your Trialforce Master org

The Trialforce Master Org is your source org to create trial orgs. You will install your package on this Master Org, and also some data so that your prospects have something that they can play with when they first log in to your Trial.
Once you've received your login credentials to the Trialforce Management Org, you will create a Trialforce Master Org by following the steps below (Figure 3):

• Navigate to Your Name | Setup | Trialforce | Master Organizations
• Click on New button

  Figure 3: Creating a Trialforce Master Organization

• Now that the Trialforce Master Organization is created you can login as shown below (Figure 4).

  Figure 4: Creating a Trialforce Master Organization

• Then begin customizing the Trialforce Master org exactly the way you want your prospective customers to experience it. As a best practice, you should load some data in to your Trialforce Master Org so that your prospects have something that they can play with when they first log in to your Trial.

  9. Request your Trialforce Organization Template and link to the Form

  The Trialforce Organization Template is the template generated from your Master Organization Organisation. It is used to generate customer Trialforce orgs automatically. To automate this process you will need to customize your FormName to bind it with your Template ID.
  From the Trialforce Master Organization you will create an Organization Template by following the steps below (Figure 4)

• Navigate to Your Name | Setup | Trialforce
• Click the New Organization template button

  Figure 4: generating a Trialforce Organization Template

• Once the Organization template ID is available, please log a case from the partner portal in the "Trialforce > Trialforce Update" category. Be sure to include your Trialforce Organization Template ID.

Figure 5: the Trialforce Organization Template ID

10. Host your Trial page

Once you receive a notification that your case has been completed, now you can test the registration page again to see if the new org is identical with your Trialforce Master Org. Now every time a prospective user enters their information and submits your form, salesforce.com will provision a Trial based off of your Trialforce Template.

Closed Loop Process from Trial to Lead

In addition to provisioning the trial instance of your application, Salesforce will also deposit a lead into your Salesforce Partner Portal. This lead will contain the information from your trial registration page. You should consider this a fall back position to managing your trial prospects though, as you cannot add additional fields to the trial registration page.

It is recommended that you siphon the prospect data off of the HTML trial form before it posts to the Salesforce provisioning server. This way, you can manage your prospect information, create a lead associated to that prospect and begin your own email drip campaign to guide the prospect through the trial process and towards a buying decision. This follow up process is critical to realizing results from the Trialforce approach. It is strongly recommended that you completely define the post-sales and marketing process to support your prospects during the trial phase, before you begin to offer free trials from your Web site.

Also, be aware that if you have installed a Managed Package in to your template, a Lead will be created in your LMO as well.

Maintaining Trialforce

You should install the latest version of your package into your Trialforce Master Org and complete Step 7 above.

Resources

• How to Create and Register a Package - Outlines the steps to create a Managed Package
• License Management App - Get this free app to manage the licenses of your Managed Package

Trialforce FAQ

Q. Once a prospect has decided to buy my trial, how do I activate their trial?
A. Two things need to occur here:

1. Using the LMA, you can log into your Production org and modify their license from Trial to Active. This will take of your Force.com app.
2. If you are an Embedded Force.com partner, under the terms of your agreement, you can work with your Account Executive to purchase the Salesforce licenses on behalf of your prospect. If not, the prospect can contact 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE (1-800-667-6389) and a Sales Rep will assist finding the appropriate Salesforce licenses that are required to run your application.

Q. How do I upgrade my customers to a new version of my app?
A. A. In your DE org, you will want to create a new version of your Managed Package and upload this version in the Released state. Once you upload, you can share the Install URL with your existing customers or use the Push Patch Upgrade.

Q. What if my Force.com app relies on Salesforce CRM functionality?
A. Please work with your Business Development Manager to understand our co-sell model where a Salesforce Account Executive will sell Salesforce CRM and the partner will sell their Force.com app.

Q. Can I offer my app through both Trialforce and AppExchange?
A. Of course! Trialforce and AppExchange are available to eligible partners and an effective distribution engine when used together. You may even want to advertise your Trialforce page on your AppExchange listing and vice versa.

Q. How do I get a login to Partner Portal?
A. Please visit the partner portal and register as a partner to get access.

Q. Why do my customers get a "Welcome to Salesforce" email when they signup through Trialforce?