Overview and benefits of Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is a web-based enterprise platform that you can access from anywhere, anytime, and on any device as long as you are connected to the Internet. It is a cloud application, so you do not need to purchase any server/hardware, operating system, or database to use it. If you haven't used Salesforce.com before, then let me tell you that it is a web-based application like Gmail or Yahoo e-mail, but it takes this a step further because it allows you to configure and customize it to suit your business needs.

When you sign up for Salesforce, you will be provided with an "organization," which is basically a software environment. Hardware, the operating system, and the database are shared among Salesforce customers within the same "instance". Salesforce customers within the same instance run the same version of platform.

You can illustrate the Salesforce platform as an apartment building, shared by many residences. In this multitenant environment, each organization's data, configuration, and users are completely isolated and are not accessible to any other organization. So, when you configure your Salesforce organization, the metadata changes are only for your organization. A similar rule applies to your database; access to it is only for your registered users.

If you have heard about cloud computing, you will easily understand that since Salesforce.com is a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, you will only need to configure Salesforce.com to start using it. Everything from object model and business logic to page layouts, reports, and dashboards is provided by the Salesforce platform. It also has its own Java-like programming language called Apex, and an HTML-like visual markup language called Visualforce page for custom user interface design.

Since the Salesforce team takes care of the infrastructure, maintenance, software upgrades, backup, and performance, it benefits companies by lowering the IT cost and the cost of resources. As a Salesforce subscriber, you just need to maintain your users and implement the business processes you need.

When Mark Benioff started Salesforce.com from his apartment in San Francisco back in 1997, Salesforce.com was intended to act as a CRM application only. However, as the platform grew and became more robust, Salesforce opened up its platform to more customization, where you could build any kind of applications beyond CRM.

The following products are available in this platform at the time of writing this book:

In summary, the advantages of using Salesforce.com compared to other on-premise applications are as follows: