Blackthorn Roadmap

We've had years of requests for a public roadmap, and years of saying we'll have one eventually. Well, it's here ! I didn't want to just lob the link across in a post, it needs context for our decisions, broken out by app.

We don't have timelines tied to these, only priority orders. Timelines don't quite align with agile development, plus they can shift to favor one feature vs another, but the work isn't linear. We have four teams working on these together.

There was also a long debate internally as to whether we should share this. Despite innumerable reasons why not to, here it is! If you have any feedback, email me at [email protected].

Blackthorn Payments

We have three codebases for payments across Events, PayLink, and DocumentLink. With the coming of our Commerce app below, we were going to have four. So we decided to globalize our 'checkout', our consumer-facing gateway integrations, as a headless app. The app will be structured on demand using a JSON, much like Stripe Checkout (while still supporting Stripe Checkout - like Inception ). The bulk of our Payments work is feeding this model, which lends to our other apps.

We'll also be adding a direct Cybersource integration. We support Authorize.net and Spreedly today as alternatives to Cybersource, as they share many of the same processors, but we're adding Cybersource for customers who have high switching costs.

Blackthorn Events

Salesforce never would've made Trailhead if the platform was so easy to use. You simply can't use an app with just the standard UI if the app has a fair number of objects. Relational databases were not built to navigate without custom UIs, they were built as backend structures, but Salesforce grew quickly without custom UIs. This aided in its customizability but led to non-power users not really knowing where to start.

To solve for this, we built an event building wizard ~two years ago, and since then, the number one request we got was for an inline editor. So, that's what we'll be launching in a few months. Stay tuned, it's pretty awesome.

The other big initiative is our scalability, which I wrote about here under 'Caching & load balancing'.

Blackthorn 'Commerce'

Many of our higher ed and nonprofit customers morphed our Events app into stores to sell courses, but they're just too different. So we're building a store app.

It will be selling courses, not general commerce. Big complex use cases will still go to Lightning B2C/B2B Commerce, but continuing and executive education will be fielded by our app, focusing on their use cases. These include but will not be limited to conditional purchases (finish two courses, eligible to buy the third in the series), and group purchases for future redemption.

It needs a new name though. As the app will be very different from Salesforce's, if you have a naming suggestion, please email me. [email protected]. I'll send you some Blackthorn swag and a gift if we pick the name.

Salesforce doesn't have a 'Shopify for Salesforce' where you can install the app and have a live store in under an hour from install. That's the target here.

Blackthorn Messaging

We're rolling out our smart scheduler, so you can schedule outbound emails and SMS messages in the Messaging app, or as part of our Events app. The app has different functionality than Marketing Cloud's messaging, and now has some purpose-built functionality that works with our Events app.

We've had significant interest to serve SMS in EMEA to our Events customers, so this one is next up!