New Trailhead Badge – Trailhead Builder for ISVs?

I’m pretty sure I’m not going to lose any friends, or make any waves, if I come out and say Trailhead is awesome… so…

TRAILHEAD IS AWESOME!
– Todd Halfpenny, Mobile Technical Architect, 2016

And as a dev – and all round tech lover – interested in Salesforce, I absolutely love the accessibility to information and training. And that’s not to mention the the broadness of topics it covers, from Apex development, to generating reports, to promoting diversity within your organisation.

And with my ISV Hat on?

Of course, it’s good for us, in terms of upskilling our employees and in general giving access to superb resources for all future staff. But, and I’m just going to come out and say it, I want more.

Imagine this, a Trailhead Builder for ISVs (in fact wouldn’t it be great to earn your Trailhead Builder for ISVs Trailhead badge).

Trailhead Builder for ISVs badge

That’s right, wouldn’t it be great if you were, say, employed at Ebsta and you had a tool to create a Getting Started with Ebsta trail and have trails such as Creating Your First Templates. How fantastic would it be if you could submit a config file that described a set of objects and properties to be evaluated, which could be used to do the brilliant automated marking that Trailhead does when it connects to your dev org?

I know for sure that our customers would appreciate some MobileCaddy badges, either for admins or devs. I can really see how valuable a badge for Defining Your First Fully Offline Mobile Table could be to our clients, be they part of an end user org or a MobileCaddy Partner. It’s all well and good having our own training resources, but if we could offer an interactive, online pool of information and tests, that aligned to those they are likely to be familiar with, then it can only be positive.

Such trails become even more important, I believe, when ISVs are faced with not just upgrading their apps to be Lightning-compliant, but also having to update their training materials, courses and documentation, too.

I can only imagine that such tools or processes exist internally, and hope that this post my tweak some interest and ignite some excitement over such feature set being available for ISVs.