Enterprise Customers

To understand the power of second-generation packaging, let’s first discuss how packaging works in the traditional change set development model. For most production orgs, metadata is traditionally contained in two buckets: a set of managed packages installed from the AppExchange or unpackaged metadata. At the same time, enterprises often invest in Salesforce customizations to support business processes and extend the power of the Salesforce platform. In the change set development model, all the metadata that belongs to that custom app or extension is contained in your Salesforce org, but it’s not isolated or organized in a way that makes it easy to upgrade and maintain.

In the package development model, second-generation packages let you harness and extend your investments in the Salesforce platform in two ways. First, you can organize the unpackaged metadata in your production org into well-defined packages. These packages are versionable, and are easy to maintain, update, install, and upgrade. In your production org, you can inspect which metadata came from which package version, and the set of all metadata associated with the package version. Once your happy soup of metadata is organized into packages, updates and customizations are much easier to manage across your development team.