I was reading through the new API features coming out in the next release of Salesforce (Summer '07) when the Metadata API feature caught my eye. This feature addresses a big pain point we have today, which is helping customers to quickly install and configure their Salesforce org for i-Dialogue web site integration.

AppExchange packages are fairly self-contained and cannot modify native objects. Many tasks are left to manual configuration. For example, if we want to extend Salesforce Campaigns with detailed, real-time information like number of emails sent, click-through-rate, or web pages viewed, then we must manually create these metrics as custom fields on the Campaign object. Our default AppExchange package only installs a couple additional custom objects (a web event data warehouse).

But the Metadata API apparently will let us remotely create these fields on the Campaign object, conceivably allowing us to add a link on the "About" tab of our package that instructs our service to configure your Salesforce environment for rich Campaign management and real-time web analytics.

So, I started thinking... why have anything at all in the AppExchange package except the smart "About" tab? Just let customers download the bare essentials and let our service remotely provision Salesforce to guarantee installation/configuration success every time? Why cast our fate into the wind and use Managed Packages when implementing upgrades? With the Metadata API, we can figure out precisely which object/fields are installed and automate upgrades of both Salesforce and your i-Dialogue web site.