Enterprise Customers

To understand the power of unlocked packages, 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 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 metadata that belongs to the custom app or extension is contained in your Salesforce org. However, it’s not isolated or organized in a way that makes it easy to upgrade and maintain.

In the package development model, unlocked packages let you harness and extend your investments in the Salesforce platform in two ways. You can organize the unpackaged metadata in your production org into well-defined packages. These packages are versionable and 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. When your “happy soup” of metadata is organized into packages, updates and customizations are much easier to manage across your development team.