Rolling back a managed released package?

Question

We have a managed released package currently undergoing security review. While that is happening, we would like to make some changes to the tab layout of our application. Unfortunately, it seems that I can change very little to do with our tabs in our managed released package. I would like to get the package into the hands of beta testers, but I need to make the aforementioned tab changes first. Is there any way at all that I can do this? I would rather not have the beta testers install an unmanaged package, as there are post-installation steps that they would have to execute manually.

What are our options here?

Answer 1

Salesforce support has tools to undo a managed package release. They do this by converting you "managed - released" package into a "managed - beta" which undoes the locking with newly added components.

There is one major prerequisite before they can do this: the version you want to un-release needs to be uninstalled from ALL organizations.

This can pose a major issue if you've already upgraded customers - since there's no way to downgrade a package, but in your case it sounds like you might be lucky enough for your package to not be installed in any others other than testing.

Open a case, from the partner portal and they should be able to help.

Answer 2

Per the following documentation, you can delete Custom Tabs from a released managed package. http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/packagingGuide/Content/packaging_managed_component_deletion.htm

There are a few considerations:

• Once you delete a tab, you cannot create another tab with the same name so you'd have to rename the tab to make it point to a new page
• Any orgs which have your package installed already will not have the tab deleted automatically. However, the tab will be deletable from their org manually.

I know you had to cut a managed released version to submit for security review, but I'm not sure how much you're using beta managed packages as part of your process. I've been working on a project which has been running about 9 months and we spent the first 8 doing only beta managed package releases to allow us the flexibility to avoid these type of problems.

I know it's too late for that, but you might want to consider using beta releases moving forward when you add functionality to your package. In beta, new metadata you add is much easier to change until you bundle it into the next production release.