salesforce.com as a development platform – I am impressed
Over the last few weeks, I have been on a couple of SalesForce events and have been investigating the capabilities of the platform. I am impressed.
When I started I figured that the platform would be something like Webex Weboffice – A CRM with the ability to add fields, custom reports and create some custom database tables.
SalesForce can do that, but a lot more as well. The things that particularly impressed me were:
- So much can be done through the user interface, enabling a power excel user to create competent departmental apps with no developers needed.
- Very powerful workflow and alerts – the most complex workflow I have designed was around Intellectual Property. SalesForce can replicate almost all of that workflow without the need to resort to code. Features include standard things like create tasks, alerts (vie email) etc. Also included are some more advanced features – the ability to set database table contents and derive data from other areas of your database. Very powerful indeed.
- Deployment processes – sandboxes and staging environments are catered for with the ability to build change sets. The deployment process is a tad clunky (for example there is no ‘build all changes from this instance’ button – changes need to be manually selected – but I am sure it will be smoothed out in further releases.
There are some areas that need tidying, particularly the relationships between salesforce.com, force.com and database.com. I found what happens where to be very confusing.
Overall, if I were looking to deploy an enterprise platform for application development, that could be used particularly by the departmental power user type, then salesforce.com would be top of my list right now.
