FAQ

General

Q: Do I have to install any add-on apps?
A: Yes, Blackthorn | Payments. It's included in the cost of Events and is needed for both free and paid Events as it handles the checkout flow.

Q: How is it priced?
A: See our AppExchange listing.

Salesforce-related

Q: Is all data native to Salesforce?
A: Yes.

Q: Is there an integration to build?
A: No.

Q: Where does the checkout "go"?
A: All checkouts process through Salesforce. Payments process through Stripe in a PCI-compliant method.

Q: What happens during a checkout?
A: Event Checkout Flow

Q: Does it work with Salesforce Communities?
A: Yes.

Q: Can the app send emails?
A: Yes. All data is native to Salesforce so you can utilize native Salesforce features to send emails, such as Workflow Rules or Process Builder processes with Email Alerts. You can also utilize Pardot, Marketing Cloud, IBM Watson, MailChimp, or any other email app that can work with Salesforce Custom Objects.

Q: Waitlisting?
A: Yes, manual or automated, with multiple criteria.

Q: Is there matching logic?
A: Yes, we Salesforce's duplicate matching rule logic, so you can get pretty creative with your matching rules. Generally speaking, email matching is your best bet.

Attendee Check-in app

Q: Do you have a mobile app?
A: Yes, for Event organizers to manage check-in.

Security

Q: Where is Blackthorn's Heroku stack based?
A: Today, our Heroku instance is hosted in the USA. However, all of our static assets are run through our global CDN called Cloudflare. This includes all of the images that are rendered in multiple device sizes and optimized for load speed. Later this year we will be moving to a global CDN for increased performance. As it stands today, our global load times of our Events are fast due to our non-personally identifiable information (pii) Heroku caching.

Our Heroku instance saves zero pii. All pii is stored in the client Salesforce account.

Q: Is Blackthorn Fed Ramp Certified?
A: Blackthorn is not a cloud based solution, and thus typically does not fall within Fedramp parameters.

We provide our customers a managed package of objects that get uploaded and used inside their Salesforce accounts and that is where all customer data is stored. Salesforce is fully Fedramp certified, and that is where all personally identifiable information is stored.

We leverage a Salesforce product known as Heroku to surface Event web pages. Non-sensitive Event data like event names and dates is cached on Heroku for fast loading and reduced queries. We don't believe Heroku is Fedramp certified, but given the innocuous nature of the Event data cached there, that might not be of concern.

Our app model allows customers to leverage Salesforce directly to manage their Events, enjoying the full Fedramp certification Salesforce has to offer.

Q: Issues migrating data?
A: Try setting the batch size to 1 if you're running into errors.

Q: Caching issues
A: Caching issues are one of the biggest problem for any developer. At Blackthorn, we do our best to address caching issues. We have a database cache via connect360, an application cache on Events backend split into multiple partitions, Content Delivery Network (CDN) Caching where applicable, and we try to take advantage of browser caching. With all of these implemented, you may still receive a caching error (Error 2004) and may need to do a hard refresh for the page to load. This will only happen when making a change to the page, end-users will not see this error.