SalesForce Introduction

May 06, 2014By Rich Helton

Introduction

•Salesforce is originally a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.•CRM is originally software for managing customer interaction, such as scheduling tasks, emailing, texting, and many more tasks.•Salesforce grew into a cloud software solution and acquired several other companies for Paas and Saas.

Competing Products

lFor Google Apps,there is the Google App Engine,https://developers.google.com/appengine/lFor Microsoft, there is Microsft Azure,http://azure.microsoft.com/lFor Amazon, there is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud EC2,http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

Platform as a Service

Platform as a service (PaaS) is a category of cloud computing services that provides a computing platform and a solution stack as a service. The provider provides the networks, servers, storage, and other services that are required to host the consumer's application

Software as a Service

Software as a service (SaaS) is a software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network, typically the Internet.

Subscription

Has a pay as you go subscription modelhttp://www.salesforce.com/in/crm/editions-pricing.jsp

Introducing Force.com

lForce.com is a cloud computing platform as a service system from Salesforce.com,that developers use to build multitenant applications hosted on their servers as a service.lSalesforce.com is the Sales Cloud for ready-to-use products for CRM.lForce.com does not expose the underlying infrastructure.

Multi-tenancy

Multi-tenancy refers to a principle in software architecture where a single instance of the software runs on a server, serving multiple client-organizations (tenants). Multitenancy contrasts with multi-instance architectures where separate software instances (or hardware systems) operate on behalf of different client organizations.

SalesForce Pieces

Chatter

Chatter is a brand-new way to collaborate at work. Because status information about people and important projects is automatically pushed to you, Chatter makes it easy to connect with the people and information you care about most.

Chatter Example

http://www.salesforce.com/chatter/gettingstarted/examples/sales

Typical 3-tier Architecture (Microsoft)

Salesforce

Salesforce is also 3-tier, but many of the internals are handled through abstraction. There are:1) Out-of-box interfaces, which include security, dashboards, workflow, and user interfaces. Coding is optional.2) VisualForce is an editor for customization of User Interfaces if not out-of-box.3) Apex, using the developer console, is for writing code to the Salesforce API, for example a SOAP or batch application for importing custom data.

VisualForce

Visualforce is a framework that allows developers to build sophisticated, custom user interfaces that can be hosted natively on the Force.com platform. The Visualforce framework includes a tag-based markup language, similar to HTML, and a set of server-side “standard controllers” that make basic database operations, such as queries and saves, very simple to perform.

VisualForce -MVC

The Model-View-Controller is the most common design in Software Architecture.

VisualForce - Example

Apex

Apex is a strongly typed, object-oriented programming language that allows developers to execute flow and transaction control statements on the Force.com platform server in conjunction with calls to the Force.com API. Using syntax that looks like Java and acts like database stored procedures, Apex enables developers to add business logic.

Developer Console - Example

AppExchange

Launched in 2005, AppExchange is a marketplace for cloud computing Web application built for the Salesforce.com community.Some modules are free and some require a license fee. Examples of modules are Google Mail and Android connectors. https://appexchange.salesforce.com

Some Workbooks

l32 guides that you shouldn't miss → http://www.ecquire.com/blog/32-salesforce-guides/l4,000 page “How to be Successful with Salesforce” → http://na9.salesforce.com/help/pdfs/en/sf.pdflDifferent workbooks → https://developer.salesforce.com/page/Force.com_workbook

Useful links

lCode Examples->https://developer.salesforce.com/page/Code_SampleslTools →lhttps://developer.salesforce.com/page/Code_Samplesl