What Is Salesforce.com?
Salesforce.com was founded in 1999 by former Oracel executive Marc Benioff . In June 2004, the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock symbol CRM. Initial investors in salesforce.com were Marc Benioff, Larry Ellison, Halsey Minor, Magdalena Yesil and Igor Sill, Geneva Venture Partners.
Products and Services
Customer Relationship Management
Salesforce.com's CRM solution is broken down into several applications: Sales, Service & Support, Partner Relationship Management, Marketing, Content, Ideas and Analytics.
Force.com Platform
Salesforce.com's Platform-as-a-Service product is known as the Force.com Platform. The platform allows external developers to create add-on applications that integrate into the main Salesforce application and are hosted on salesforce.com's infrastructure.
These applications are built using Apex (a proprietary Java-like programming language for the Force.com Platform) and Visualforce (an XML-like syntax for building user interfaces in HTML, AJAX or Flex).
AppExchange
Launched in 2005, AppExchange is a directory of applications built for Salesforce by third-party developers which users can purchase and add to their Salesforce environment. As of September 2008, there are over 800 applications available from over 450 ISVs.
Customization
Salesforce users can customize their CRM application. In the system, there are tabs such as "Contacts", "Reports", and "Accounts". Each tab contains associated information. For example, "Contacts" has fields like First Name, Last Name, Email, etc.
Customization can be done on each tab, by adding user-defined custom fields.
Customization can also be done at the "platform" level by adding customized applications to a Salesforce.com instance, that is adding sets of customized / novel tabs for specific vertical- or function-level (Finance, Human Resources, etc) features.
Web Services
In addition to the web interface, Salesforce offers a Web Services API that enables integration with other systems.
Languages
English, Dutch, Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.
Other
Other technologies in use at salesforce.com are Resin Application Server, and the in-house technologies Apex (a Java-like programming language and programming platform) and S-controls (Salesforce widgets - these are predominantly based on JavaScript).
If you're not in sales, you might not even know what Salesforce.com does or even what Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is. Salesforce started out primarily offering software for sales groups to manage their customer relationships. This included simple tools like address books, which are called contacts in the Salesforce world, and more complicated processes to track potential customers from lead to sale. Sales people also like reports with charts and graphs, so those are part of the package.
The interesting point from a developer's perspective is that the underlying technology is based around database concepts, with default actions and views. Salesforce has almost completely opened up this infrastructure. Even novice users can create custom objects that are the equivalent of database tables, and add or remove fields from the default objects.
This infrastructure includes a built-in customer base, built-in distribution through the AppExchange directory, built-in data and authentication models, developer support on the AppExchange Developer Network, and a slew of programming tools. That means developers can focus on solving new problems and not reinventing solutions to old ones.
This infrastructure has been flexible enough to allow Salesforce to branch out into other business applications like marketing and customer support. It has also been flexible enough to allow customers to build their own applications in areas like financial services and human resources.
An Introduction to Salesforce.com's AppExchange
Two main things set Salesforce apart from other companies building development platforms. The first is that their platform is entirely "on demand", meaning there's no installed software, it runs across the internet in a software as a service model. The other is the directory of Salesforce applications called AppExchange. You can build apps and keep them within your organization -- if, for example, you work in a corporate IT department. But if you want to share your application with the world, for profit or otherwise, the AppExchange directory is the answer. It's integrated directly into all Salesforce accounts. If you build an application inside your own account, you can package it directly to the AppExchange directory. Customers who find your application on AppExchange can install it directly into their accounts. Salesforce wants to remove the burden of customer acquisition and distribution so that developers can focus on what they do best: finding and solving problems. I met a number of small companies and individual consultants who all said that Salesforce is making it easier to sell software to the corporate world.
Signing Up
To get a feel for what Salesforce customers experience, you need to sign up for an account. This will also serve as a sandbox for developing your own applications. You might be tempted to sign up for the 30-day, free trial offer that is prominently advertised on their home page, but signing up for a developer account from the
will give you an account that never expires. The account does come with a few limitations. You can only have two users, one an admin account so that you can build and install applications and the other a normal user account so you can test your work from the perspective of a normal user. The account has a 2MB data limit, which is enough space to add roughly 1500 contacts. There seem to be some other limitations--you can't send mass emails, for example--but I didn't notice any that would hinder development.
After you
for an account you'll be sent a confirmation email. Following the link in the email will give you your first look at your new Salesforce account.
Click for a larger view.
Browse the tabs to get a sense of the default functionality that comes with a Salesforce account.
Customizing
For most Salesforce customers, customizing their Salesforce account is a common and exciting experience that feels like application building. This functionality is available in the Setup area. Here users can add and remove fields, customize templates, and even create new database tables that come with automatically created forms and views. Salesforce provides a web UI for all of this functionality.
Don't worry, as a developer you're going to be able to build applications much more powerful than what most users are creating using the Salesforce customization forms. You should, however, know how to use these. You will need this familiarity if you want to extend the data schema, install AppExchange applications, or package your own AppExchange applications.
Start by clicking the Setup link located above the tabs.
Later in this article, we'll be using this area to install an application from AppExchange. For now let's get a feel for how the Setup area works by adding a
Websitefield to the
Contactsobject, as many of our friends have their own websites.
Start by choosing Customize -> Contacts -> Fields in the left navigation bar. This will show a long list of the standard fields for the
Contactsobject.
Click for a larger view.
At the bottom of the list of fields is a list of custom fields and a New button. Clicking this button will start you on a four-step process for adding a field to the
Contactsobject.
The first step is to select a field type. I was expecting to make this a text field, but found that Salesforce has an explicit URL field type that ensures that the URL will be displayed as a link. Choose the URL field type.
The second step is to give the field a label and a name. The label is shown on displays and reports alongside the field contents. The name is what you're going to use to reference the field when you're writing code. I chose "Website" for the label and "website" for the name.
The last two steps are important if you're managing a Salesforce account with thousands of users. If that were the case, you would want to spend some time setting the access controls and templates. For our purposes, you should just choose the defaults and then save your changes. To see your handiwork, visit the Contacts tab and click the New button. You should see that your field has been automatically added to the form.
Installing an AppExchange Application
Before we can build our own application for the AppExchange, we need to figure out how to install other people's applications.
The first step is to visit the
. There are over 400 applications in the directory so far. Some of the applications require that you pay for them. Some require that you install software on your own server. But many are completely free applications that run entirely in your Salesforce instance. The Pricing section of each application entry will let you know if the application is free or not.
If you see a Get It Now button then you can install the application directly into your Salesforce account. Other applications have Download buttons instead. These are applications that you run on your desktop or server that access your Salesforce account through the API.
Let's install
, an application that lets you create and track Google AdWords campaigns from within Salesforce. It's a good example of a mashup that combines an external service with the database and reporting features of Salesforce.
Click the Get It Now button to start the installation process. This will take you through a series of confirmation screens asking you to review legal terms, the contents of the package, and security settings. On step 3, choose "Grant access to all users," since we're installing into an account that doesn't have any users.
It turns out that you still have a little more work to do once you've finished the install process. You need to customize your account through the Setup area so that the new application is visible. It would be nice if applications came with a help document that walked you through this process. However, in my experience the next step is usually the same. Most applications come with their own tab, which you need to add to your visible tabs. In this case click the arrow on your last tab, which takes you to the All Tabs tab. Then click the Customize My Tabs button.
Click for a larger view.
This will give you a form for moving available tabs to your selected tabs. Choose Search Campaigns from the Available Tabs list and move it to the Selected Tabs list.
Once you have saved your choice you'll see a new Search Campaigns tab that will let you create and track AdWords campaigns.
Building Native Applications
The most common form of Salesforce application development is done entirely through the Salesforce.com interface. Native applications are built by extending Salesforce's data schema, by writing custom HTML, and by writing JavaScript. These native applications can be bundled and shared through AppExchange.
Extending the data schema can be as simple as adding a field to an existing object like we did when we added a website field to the
Contactobject. It can also mean creating your own objects. These are essentially database tables, called "custom objects" in Salesforce parlance. Whenever you make a schema change, Salesforce automatically creates or updates the related forms and pages. You don't need to build the standard CRUD actions like create, update, show, or list.
Like most customizations, you can add custom objects through the Setup area. Get started by visiting Setup and then Build -> Custom Objects in the left sidebar.
Click for a larger view.
Salesforce has just released a book that shows how to build an example recruiting application using native application techniques. They gave away hard copies of the book for free at their Dreamforce conference, but they've also just started including a link to a PDF copy as part of an advertising campaign on TechCrunch. Until they produce a more official page, you can download the book for free from their advertisement landing page.
Building Custom Pages with S-Controls
Congratulations on graduating from the basics. Most Salesforce development happens entirely through the Salesforce web UI. This gives incredible power to customize and build applications to people who wouldn't normally have any control over their application. However, you probably want to write code. For native applications, that starts with S-Controls.
S-Controls let you write your own HTML in order to build pages and forms. S-Controls include templating variables that let you access Salesforce data. The application-building part can be done in any web application technology, like Java applets or Flash. However, most people use JavaScript.
Salesforce is putting a lot of work into their Ajax toolkit. This toolkit allows you to call back to the Salesforce API in order to read and write data to the database. The beta release includes two excellent tutorials to get you started.
The Ajax toolkit will graduate from beta in Salesforce's Winter '07 release, due out in the next few months.
Accessing Data with SOQL
Many times when you're developing for Salesforce you'll be treating it like a database. Salesforce provides an SQL-like query language called SOQL that you use in combination with the API to query data. SOQL has been limited by the ability of Salesforce to host the high volume and unpredictable data queries of its users. The Winter '07 release will eliminate the biggest limitation, finally allowing users to join multiple tables. The other difference you'll notice right away is that queries won't return the full result of a large data set. Instead you'll have to use
queryMoreuntil you've retrieved everything you need.
The developer documentation has the basic syntax.
The Salesforce API
So far, we've been talking about building applications that are limited to filling out web forms and writing JavaScript. If you'd rather build an application in your favorite programming language, then you should plan on hosting the application on your own server and treating Salesforce as a database that you access through their API. This way you can access the data that your company or client is entering into the Salesforce application without having to be an expert yourself.
The
Salesforce Projects and Toolkits page
lists toolkits for almost every language including Java, .NET, Perl, PHP, and Ruby. Many of the toolkits hide the API behind a traditional Object Relational Model.
Before you get started, you need to generate and download a Salesforce WSDL file. Do this by going to the Setup area and then to Integrate -> AppExchange API.
Here's an example Perl script that would list the names, emails, and websites of all of our contacts. You could get going with a similar few lines of code in almost any language.
The
will probably be your main reference when using the API.
Note: Content of this post is collected from salesforce.com and other sites. This is presented in a summarized way for your use.
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