Nov 28, 2017 No Comment

Partitioned Versioning Enables Risk-free Production Upgrades to Salesforce Mobile Apps

Traditional deployments of updates to mobile applications are hard, and harder still in the enterprise world. Mass, uncontrolled updates to users are risky at best. Partitioned Versioning, with MobileCaddy, enables a low impact, highly iterative, approach to application update deployments which minimises the risks.

Mobile applications need to be updated for many reasons. It’s common for an initial release of a new app to contain bugs that weren’t caught in sandbox and developer environments, for example, or for a misunderstanding of workflow to pass through the UAT stage unnoticed.

Beyond this, once an app is live and mature, it will still need to evolve in line with many factors including (but not limited to): new business requirements, regulatory updates, alignment with new OS and hardware capabilities, and of course in our world modifications to support new Salesforce releases.

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Oct 17, 2017 1 Comment

How MobileCaddy Aids Bugless Salesforce Releases

We’re all aware of the thrice-yearly Salesforce releases, and how they’re unstoppable forces. We’re all also aware that bugs exist, and that any bug found post-launch is a lot more expensive than one found during testing. Here’s a quick story on one such bug, and how MobileCaddy helped to get it removed from the Winter ‘18 release.

Whenever Salesforce patches make their way into pre-release orgs our daily test runs kick off and identify the change. These tests run on 15+ org setups and report back any issues that might have been observed. One such observation was reported back during the early days of Summer ‘17 patch rollouts into pre-release. The issue manifested itself initially as the inability to complete the authentication flow on iOS devices built with Salesforce Mobile SDK v4.0.2 and lower.

During the investigations into the issue, we raised a notification on our trust site to keep our partners and customers aware of the risk of the behaviour. We also developed some internal work-arounds. If the issue wasn’t fixed prior to Summer ‘17 making it’s way into our partners’ sandboxes, these would let us unblock them from their development and testing processes.

We also discovered that the bug broke the vanilla experience of browsing standard Visualforce pages on iOS Safari; this could be bad if it got through into production.

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Jul 17, 2017 No Comment

Keeping Your Salesforce Mobile Apps Working Through OS Version Updates

Changes frequently occur to mobile operating systems outside your control, and your awareness, which can cause serious problems for your applications. When those apps are supporting critical business processes, it’s vital you’re constantly testing to ensure their performance is never compromised. This article will outline an approach to prevent OS version updates, upgrades, and other environment changes from affecting your enterprise mobile apps.

 

Apple_AndroidOperating and supporting any enterprise application in the context of mobile is challenging, because you don’t have control over that app’s underlying operating systems, nor can you predict new updates, upgrades, or patches being released.

This presents a problem for those responsible, because changes to an OS can cause mobile apps to suffer in their performance, or even stop working entirely. When those apps have been deployed into functions which are critical to the daily running of the business, that effectively renders the employees or community users relying on the app incapable as well, which simply can’t be allowed to happen.

So, firstly… Understand your app

You need to be aware of all the various components which make up your application, how they interact with each other, and what relationship they have with the OS.

Any number of things within your app can change without your knowledge, and the various elements and supported systems mean that continual testing is an absolute necessity to avoid app failure. This becomes even more important when applications are supporting business critical processes and workflows.

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Jun 19, 2017 No Comment

Exploring the Developer Skills Needed to Build Apps with MobileCaddy

The MobileCaddy framework removes a great deal of the hard work for developers tasked with building sophisticated enterprise mobile apps. This means the business investing in the app won’t need to seek new developer skills or spend to recruit new team members thanks to MobileCaddy, and the developers can focus entirely on delivering the app itself. This article will detail the many ways the framework makes this possible, giving the business complete confidence it will be getting the app it needs.

 

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You’ll always need capable, competent people to build a mobile app which can add value to an organisation beyond the obvious improvements to basic worker productivity. That’s why finding a solution which allows the people you already have to rely on their existing skills and focus on delivering that app, rather than working on tedious, time-consuming development, is so important.

With the MobileCaddy Application Delivery Framework, developers can quickly and easily build these more advanced mobile apps using a familiar set of skills, as the solution removes the need for specialist development, and provides helpful guidance across all stages of the project.

Here, we’ll answer key questions our partners and clients ask us about the skills needed to begin a mobile project on the Salesforce platform using the MobileCaddy Application Delivery Framework.

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May 15, 2017 No Comment

5 Ways MobileCaddy Accelerates Salesforce Mobile App Development

MobileCaddyThe benefits of using the Salesforce platform to develop enterprise mobile apps are extensive, but there simply aren’t anywhere near as many enterprises doing so as you might expect. The reason for this is, in many cases, that it’s simply too challenging, too costly, or the expertise just aren’t available.

However, there are solutions within the global Salesforce ecosystem designed specifically to ease the pain of mobile app development for both end customers and consultancy firms alike. Once these inherent challenges are removed, the advantages of having mobile applications supporting business critical processes move into focus. These positives vastly outweigh the negatives, making those complementary partner solutions well worth searching for.

One of those negatives is the time mobile app development projects can take when approached without the necessary tools or understanding. Looking specifically into the need to accelerate the development process for those tasked with actually building mobile apps, we’ve highlighted five advantages the MobileCaddy package offers:

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