Creating an Unmanaged Package for a Salesforce Challenge

As we receive more and more salesforce.com challenge submissions, the task of installing, running and removing code from an org is becoming very resource intensive. We will be changing requirements for our salesforce.com challenges to require the submission of an unmanaged package. You'll still need to zip up your source code but you'll also need to provide the URL for the installation package.

This helps not only us but submitters for a number of reasons:

1. Submitters often forget to include part of their code (custom objects, Apex classes, etc.) and using an unmanaged often catches most of the dependencies.
2. Allows reviewers to be able to easily install submissions if they don't have ANT installed or are not familiar with ANT. Some reviewers may look at functional instead of technical aspects of the submission.
3. Allows us to easily uninstall the code so that we can reuse an org for multiple submissions.

If you are not familiar with creating an unmanaged package, here's a short video that will get you started.