What is the Salesforce.com?

First of all welcome on Salesforce platform. You are really in good technology. I have done with Salesforce DEV 401 and ADM 201 certifications. I will try to share all the knowledge from basic to advanced that I have gained throughout my experience. So stay cool and go with all of my posts for acquiring Salesforce knowledge. If you have any questions regarding Salesforce, feel free to contact us any time.

So basically what exactly the Salesforce is ?

Salesforce is a

• Cloud computing and social enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider
• CRM software (Customer Relationship Management).
• Co founded in  March 1999, by former Oracle executive Mark Benioff.
• Delivered entirely on internet  - No Software/Hardware installation required.
• Requires just a good Internet connection and Internet Browser.

What is the SaaS technology?

                  Software as a service (or SaaS) is a way of delivering applications over the Internet—as a service. Instead of installing and maintaining software, you simply access it via the Internet, freeing yourself from complex software and hardware management. Salesforce is also based on SaaS technology, where you need not worry about software/hardware installations.
                  SaaS applications are sometimes called Web-based software, on-demand software, or hosted software. Whatever the name, SaaS applications run on a SaaS provider’s servers. The provider manages access to the application, including security, availability, and performance.


Salesforce is known as best Customer Relationship Management product which is again composed of sub products Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Force.com, Chatter , Work.com and Appexchange.

• Sales Cloud manages contact information and integrates social media and real-time customer collaboration through Chatter. 
• Service Cloud includes a call center-like case tracking feature and a social networking plug-in for conversation and analytics. 
• Marketing Cloud offers Radian6, a social media monitoring and marketing application. 
• Force.com, the company's platform-as-a-service (PaaS) product, allows software developers to create Salesforce.com add-on applications. 
• Work.com offers Rypple, a social human resource (HR) performance management platform.
• App Exchange, a custom application building and sharing platform

Salesforce provides following features:

1. Manage Org Interations:

• Phone Calls
• Emails
• Chatter

2. Configuration Features:

• Page layouts: Page layouts control the layout and organization of buttons, fields, s-controls, Visualforce, custom links, and related lists. They also help determine which fields are visible, read only, and required. Page layouts can include s-controls and Visualforce pages that are rendered within a field section when the page displays. You can control the size of the s-controls and Visualforce pages, and determine whether or not a label and scroll bars display.

• Custom Fields and objects: Ability to create objects apart from standard objects provided by Salesforce as per business needs. Create custom fields to get the needed data from customers.

• Validation rules: This plays an important position to get only valid information from users. Such as business want to enter a field value that should be smaller than 1000, then with the help of validation rule the message can be placed on screen. The record will not get saved until and unless the validation rule successfully passed away. A validation rule can contain a formula or expression that evaluates the data in one or more fields and returns a value of “True” or “False”.

• Workflow rules: This rule specifies that what should be done after saving the record in database. The action may be anything from field update, email alert, tasks or outbound messages (Call through API).

• Approval rules:There must be some way which needs an approval before publishing a record into org. This is what is covered in this rule.An approval process is an automated process your organization can use to approve records in Salesforce. An approval process specifies the steps necessary for a record to be approved and who must approve it at each step. A step can apply to all records included in the process, or just records that meet certain administrator-defined criteria. An approval process also specifies the actions to take when a record is approved, rejected, recalled, or first submitted for approval.

• Robust security: Salesforce provides high level of security. With the help of Organisation wide defaults, Field level security, Profiles, Permission Sets, information can be secured from unauthorized user. 

• Multi currency: Salesforce supports business to be done with multiple currencies. Advanced currency management allows you to manage dated exchange rates within opportunities using Salesforce. Dated exchange rates allow you to map a conversion rate to a specific date range. For example, the exchange rate on January 1 was 1 USD to 1.39 AUD, but on February 1, it changed to 1 USD to 1.42 AUD. Your opportunities that closed between January 1 and February 1 use the first exchange rate (1 = 1.39), while opportunities that closed after February 1 used the second exchange rate (1 = 1.42).

3. Development Features

• 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 to most system events, including button clicks, related record updates, and Visualforce pages. Apex code can be initiated by Web service requests and from triggers on objects.

• 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. You can become a pro SFDC developer with the power of Apex and Visualforce.

• SOQL Queries: SOQL stands for Salesforce Object Query Language  This is similar to that of SQL database language but more tuned interface for Salesforce development.

• API: Salesforce provides APIs (Application Programming Interface) through which you can integrate with another system such as ERP, Pardot etc. Some of the APIs provided by Salesforce are REST API, Soap API, Bulk API etc.

• Community: Nowadays community plays an vital role to increase business widely. You can build whole website which will run completely on Salesforce platform. Using Visualforce and Apex technology, you can build and host dynamic websites.

• Sandboxes: These are the development platforms where developer can develop the functionality and then developed functionality can be transferred to production organisation.

• Change Sets: This specify which components to be sent to target organisation which is also called as Deployment.

• Force.com IDE: It is considered as best practice to use Force.Com IDE (Eclipse) while developing Salesforce classes, triggers. You can get quick suggestions while developing the code, Which reduces the error probability.

In next topic, We will go through the editions that Salesforce offer to customers.