….. So previously we talked about what is Salesforce.com and what is PaaS. Part 1 . There are other types of services as well such as IaaS (infrastructure as a service ), SaaS (Software as a service ) etc. A part of salesforce is also software as a service. Where Sales Cloud , Service Cloud etc are provided as a service. These are software bundles which are ready to be used one you login to salesforce platform. You really do not have to code anything to use these packages from salesforce. Sales Cloud consists of accounts, contacts,opportunities, quotes, forcasting, leads , campaigns etc. If you need any additional features apart from what is provided then you can customize the components to fit into your requirements. Service Cloud similarly plays role in support organizations. It has all pre built components which can be used directly with simple modifications.
This is a great platform and technology, which is growing rapidly across the globe. If I had not told you, we can have two ways to customize your components in salesforce platform.
1. Declarative approach
2. Programmatic approach
In declarative you have options of wokflow rules, validations, field updates, email alerts, visual force flows etc. And in programmatic way you have Apex code to be used. Apex is a java like language which helps you to write classes and triggers. Triggers are of same concept as in Data base. Whenever a record is operated in same way, like updated, inserted or deleted the triggers will fire and you can have functions written in a class which can be called from the trigger do certain things. Example if my account record is updated then I can have a trigger which will update related opportunity record.
Salesforce is a metadata driven platform. Everything within the platform is data or metadata. Metadata holds all the configuration in the system. In salesforce data is stored in objects. Object can be referred as tables in the traditional database systems. Fields are referred as columns. So when we say a record was created or stored in salesforce, it’s essentially the data was stored in objects and columns. So this is about data storage or database. If you see traditional programming languages, we were having a database and a client to get the data from the database. For that we needed to create connection and use it. But in salesforce we do not have to worry about the connection . The data as well as client are at the same place always so no more connections to make.
Now if you work in java , you must be using eclipse for all your coding. If you are using C# you must be using visual studio. But in salesforce you can use eclipse to code or even you can write codes in the Web browser. A true platform as a service.
As we are discussing overall of the salesforce platform, I will not go into detail of programming as of now. Will give more ideas in some other post in future.
We talked about platform, how data is stored. How we can access them. Now the presentation layer. Each object has it’s own page layouts which are very easy to configure and use. When you add a new field you can mention whether the field will be shown on the screen or not. Where exactly it should be shown. Whether it will be mandatory on that page layout or not etc. If you want to use salesforce without l learning much coding, then that’s not so difficult. Most of the things can be handled by administrators.
In the next post will talk about some real time examples of usage of the platform. Till then take care.
Keep reading and sharing. ….
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