Extend the platform where configuration is not enough.
Most organizational variation should be handled through configuration, operating-model customization, tailoring, and standard capabilities. Some customers nevertheless have a genuine requirement that none of those reach.
Scoped development, only where an extension is genuinely preferable.
Custom Extensions provides scoped development for customer-specific capabilities where there is a clear business need and where an extension is preferable to forcing the requirement through configuration.
Address justified customer-specific requirements while protecting the maintainability and upgradeability of the core platform.
Depending on product architecture and feasibility.
- Customer-specific workflows
- Specialized reports or exports
- Custom views
- Domain-specific analysis
- Additional integration components
- Customer-specific automation
- Custom operating-model support
- Approved user-experience extensions
Five steps from business need to lifecycle agreement.
Define the requirement
Understand the business need rather than starting from a proposed technical solution.
Evaluate standard options
Determine whether configuration, integration, or an existing capability can solve the problem.
Define the extension
Specify scope, behavior, interfaces, security, and lifecycle expectations.
Implement and test
Develop the extension and validate it in the target environment.
Establish lifecycle ownership
Define support, compatibility, upgrade, and maintenance responsibilities.
- Requirement analysis
- Solution design
- Custom extension
- Testing
- Documentation
- Release / deployment support
- Lifecycle agreement
- Solve the requirement without distorting the operating model to fit it.
- Keep customer-specific logic out of the shared product core.
- Know how the extension behaves when the platform moves.
- Name the owner before it ships.
A standard connector often reaches further than expected.
Where the need is connectivity rather than new platform behavior.