SALESFORCE

Why use Salesforce?

Back in time, employees managed data manually. They jotted down information and stored
them in files. This way, they failed to make use of all the available data. Gradually, as years
passed by with the advent of computers, companies made use of Excel sheets and documents
for managing their data. However, this approach proved to be time-consuming and inefficient
when handling large volumes of data.

There was a requirement to effectively handle and analyze vast volumes of user data by every
employee in the organization. The term effective refers to methods that could be incorporated to
improve customer satisfaction. This was when CRM, known as customer relationship
management, was introduced, and it addressed the above issues.

Initially, customer relationship management (CRM) solutions were hosted on a company's

server. This became time-consuming and highly expensive. Such CRMs were also challenging
to use.

The solution to this was to build an affordable and cost-effective CRM software and provide it
entirely online as a service. This was the core idea behind Salesforce.

What actually salesforce is?

Salesforce is a cloud-based service as a software (SaaS) company, which means it hosts an

application that customers can access online. It operates on a pay-as-you-go
subscription-based business model. Because all the data and information are stored in the
cloud, Salesforce is accessible from any device at any time. It also allows for live data tracking
and accurate real-time updates.
Specifically, Salesforce specializes in customer relationship management (CRM). A CRM
platform helps companies better connect with current and potential customers. The platform has
the ability to identify who a company's top leads are and even provides suggested actions and
next steps. Beyond customer acquisition, Salesforce features are intended to help keep
customers happy, which drives brand loyalty.

While there are other CRMs on the market, Salesforce is becoming the industry standard. It
offers a multitude of services that allow businesses to engage with their customers in ways that
go beyond the surface level.

Thousands of pre-built applications are available in the Salesforce app exchange, which the
expanded platform uses and helps close more sales. For example, PowerSync is an app that
syncs data between Salesforce and the eCommerce platform Magento, eliminating the need for
duplicated manual data entry.

ARCHITECTURE OF SALESFORCE
Salesforce is one of the leading CRM platforms to provide various customized services to its
customers, partners, and employees. It also provides the platform to build custom apps, pages,
components, etc., and it performs all these tasks so efficiently, mainly because of its architecture
that it follows.

Salesforce Architecture is the multilayer architecture; it contains a series of layers situated on

the top of each other.

The architectural view of the salesforce:

Explanation of Salesforce Architecture

1. In the multilayer salesforce architecture, the users are at the topmost layer
2. The user can access a layer below the user layer, which means various clouds offered
by the salesforce, such as sales cloud, service cloud, AppExchange, etc.
3. The third layer is the salesforce1 App, which allows the user to access the salesforce on
mobile device.
4. The last layer contains various other salesforce platforms, such as Force.com, Heroku,
Exact TargetFuel, etc.

Core Architecture of Salesforce

The architecture of the salesforce can be understood as a series of layers. Each layer of the
architecture has different features and functionality. Each layer is described below:

Multi-tenant: Salesforce stores data in a single database schema. There can be a single
instance of a software server with multiple tenants. Speaking about a multi-tenant architecture,
there is a single shared application service to several clients. This makes it cost-effective. On
the contrary, in a single-tenant, the development and maintenance cost must be entirely owned
by one client. Hence the multi-tenant architecture is a boon.
Metadata: Salesforce uses a metadata-driven development model. This allows developers to
only focus on building the application. This metadata-driven platform makes customization and
scaling up easy.

API: Salesforce provides a powerful source of APIs. This helps in developing and customizing
the Salesforce1 Mobile App. Every feature of the Salesforce design has been planned and
implemented precisely.
SALESFORCE SERVICES
SAAS (Software As a Service) : SAAS allows users to connect to and use cloud-based apps
over the Internet. Common examples are email, calendaring
PAAS (Platform As a Service) : PAAS offers you the framework and platform to build your
websites and apps.
IAAS (Infrastructure As a Service) : IAAS is a type of cloud computing service that offers
essential compute, storage, and networking resources on demand, on a pay-as-you-go basis.
IAAS plays a vital role in Salesforce development.

SALESFORCE CLOUD SERVICES

1. Sales Cloud: It is one of the most essential and popular products of Salesforce. It is
a CRM platform that allows you to manage your company's sales, marketing, and
customer support aspects. Sales Cloud gives you the status of the lead that will be
helpful for sales executives.
2. Marketing Cloud: Marketing is crucial when it comes to running a business.
Marketing cloud lets you run campaigns, manage emails, messages, social media,
content management, data analytics, etc., with the help of a tracking system.
3. Analytics Cloud: This enables users to create a highly visually appealing dashboard
of the available data. By doing so, you can get an in-depth understanding and
analyze the trends, business, and more.
4. IoT Cloud: Salesforce IoT cloud is used when your company needs to handle the
Internet of Things (IoT) data. This platform can take vast volumes of data generated
by various IoT devices; following this, you get real-time responses.
5. Salesforce App Cloud: You can use this service to develop custom apps that will run
on the Salesforce platform.
 6. Salesforce Service Cloud: Salesforce also helps you serve your customers. This is
a service platform for your organization’s support team. It provides features like case
tracking and social networking plug-in.

SALESFORCE APPLICATIONS

Some of the popular applications of SalesForce include:

● Customer Service: Salesforce provides excellent customer service from anywhere in

the world. It helps in resolving customer issues faster and improves support agent
response time. Salesforce allows you to unify email, social, phone, and chat support
and helps manage every channel from one view.
● Customize Data: Salesforce allows you to handle and customize different types of
data. It helps you track real-time analytics and enhance the customer experience.
● Flexible Data Reporting and Analysis: Salesforce allows flexible data reporting and
analysis. Here, sales representatives can create their reports to check the accounts they
haven’t worked on for a while.
● Understand Customer Data: The Salesforce tool makes you understand customer
data, identify their interests and perception. You can locate and re-engage inactive
customers and increase sales by tracking customer interaction.

Furthermore, some important services that SalesForce offers its users are:

1. Chatter :

Salesforce Chatter is the world’s #1 enterprise social network. This powerful

collaboration software solution empowers employees to connect, collaborate, share files,
data, and expertise, all in real-time. Chatter will help drive productivity and increase
efficiency and innovation across departments. From sales, to marketing, to management,
your entire company can use Chatter to tear down communication barriers and help your
company grow and succeed as a team.

2. SalesForce1
 Salesforce1 involves the mobile app, which delivers the Salesforce platform as mobile
apps, such as the Sales, Service, Community and Wave Analytics clouds. The Salesforce
App Exchange also features third-party applications that have been built on top of the
Salesforce platform.

SALESFORCE TOP 7 BENEFITS

1. Better Time Management

Time Management is a huge benefit of Salesforce and one of the best ways to allow a
business to grow and thrive. Thanks to comprehensive customer information and useful
planning resources, you have everything you need in one place. No more time wasted
searching through logs and files for important info.

Salesforce also has a calendar feature that makes it easy to plan projects, meetings, phone
calls, and more in one place. You’ll know what’s coming up and when.

2. Ultimate Accessibility

Since Salesforce is cloud software, it’s accessible anywhere and everywhere you have access to the Internet.
Whether you use your desktop, laptop, or smartphone, Salesforce can be reached thanks to its app. This is
important because many business owners and team members travel frequently, be it nationally,
internationally, or even between cities.

3. Increased Revenue

Without Salesforce, running a business in today’s world can cost you money. On any given day, your team
might produce a ton of data that has to be stored. Without Salesforce, you’re mostlikely sorting through this
data manually, and this is more time spent on administrative work as opposed to building customer
relationships.

When your time is tied up, it means you have less time to improve business, make connections,and grow
profits. Since the tool takes over these administrative duties and more, you’ll have more time to devote to
the business, which means more money in the long run.

4. Greater Customer Satisfaction

Similar to increased revenue, it’s safe to assume customers are more satisfied when they
interact with a business that knows their needs and the state of their relationship with you
(thanks to your CRM tool). Spend less time on administrative duties and you’ll have more time
to spend catering to your customers through a common platform.

Thanks to a highly efficient management system, you can serve your customers better by
having quicker access to their information, accounts, purchase history, and preferences.

5. Simple Account Planning

Salesforce makes it simple to create plans for accounts. With all the customer information you need readily
accessible, you’ll have an easier time placing that info into the correct accounts, and then making plans for
those accounts for optimal results for the customer.

Customers get products or services perfectly tailored to their needs, you stay organized, and you adjust your
time effectively for each client. As these accounts are created, stronger connections are made with your
clients by best meeting their needs, solving their problems, and keeping track of trends.

6. Trusted Reporting

With so much data pouring into your business, it’s easy to become lost. Salesforce keepspertinent data
organized and it helps you make sense of new data thanks to trustworthy reporting.

Keep track of all the data your business collects from social media, website analytics, app information,
business software, and more. Reporting takes this mountain of information and sorts it, analyzes it, and
makes it actionable. With the accuracy of Salesforce tech, you know the numbers are right and the readings
can be trusted.

7. Improved Team Collaboration

Lastly, team collaboration is a major benefit of Salesforce. The software allows you to connect and
communicate with team members from anywhere thanks to the “Chatter” feature. This lets you connect with
individual team members or full groups and chat about everything from your clients and their information to
other work-related topics such as territory and product/service details.
When the team is on the same page, your business is more cohesive and operates moreefficiently so that
deadlines are met and sales are finalized.
 Force.com

Force.com is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) product designed to simplify the development

and deployment of cloud-based applications and websites. Developers can create apps
and websites through the cloud IDE (integrated development environment) and deploy them
quickly to Force.com’s multi-tenant servers.
Force.com is owned by Software as a Service (SaaS) vendor Salesforce.com, who calls
the product a social and mobile app development platform. Salesforce.com also owns
Heroku, another cloud development platform.

Salesforce.com and force.com both are products of the company Salesforce which was
founded in 1999. Salesforce.com is a SaaS i.e., Software as a Service whereas
Force.com is PaaS i.e., Platform as a Service.
Salesforce.com is an out of the box solution with their three core products, Sales Cloud,
Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud. You could go out and buy the Sales Cloud today and
starting logging leads, opportunities, running reports etc. In contrast, you can go out today
and buy some Force.com licenses and you would not have an out of the box solution, no
access to leads, accounts or opportunities. You would have to build Apps, Tabs, Custom
Objects, Workflow Rules all yourself to design the kind of system that you want to use.

An interesting fact is that Salesforce.com is built on the Force.com platform

seamlessly. When you purchase Salesforce.com Licenses for Sales Cloud, you
get all of your normal tabs (Leads, Accounts etc) plus the ability to customise the whole
platform using Force.com!
This is one of the reasons why Salesforce make such an effort to create a distinction
between Standard and Custom objects in their Certifications as they are two very different
kettles of fish of which both have limitations and interact with each other very differently.
So, when you are building Custom Objects and adding in Workflows, Approval Processes
etc, this is all using Force.com. Also purchasing the force.com license is a lot cheaper than
purchasing Salesforce.com license as it does not provide a ready-to-use service.
The Force.com platform uses the Model View Controller (MVC) architectural pattern for
developing an application:

➢ Model: This defines the structure of the data. In Force.com, objects define
the data model. Salesforce has designed the platform by mapping every
entity to some object.
➢ View: This defines how the data is represented. In Force.com, page
layouts and Visualforce pages come under this category.
➢ Controller: This defines the business logic. The rules and actions which
manipulate the data control the view. In Force.com, apex classes, triggers,
workflows, approvals, and validation rules are under this category.
➢ Multitenant architecture – An application model in which all users and apps
share a single, common infrastructure and code base.
➢ Metadata-driven development model – An app development model that
allows apps to be defined as declarative blueprints, with no code required.
Data models, objects, forms, workflows, and more are defined by
metadata.
NOTE: There is a Force.com Metadata API that allows you to directly manipulate
the XML that controls the Metadata of your application/organization.
➢ Force.com Web Services API – An application programming interface that
defines a Web service that provides direct access to all data stored in the
Force.com platform from virtually any programming language and platform.
➢ Apex – The world’s first on-demand programming language, which runs in
the cloud on the Force.com platform servers.
➢ Visualforce – A framework for creating feature-rich user interfaces for
apps in the cloud.
➢ Force.com Sites – Public websites and applications that are directly
integrated with your Salesforce.com organization without requiring users to
log in with a username and password.
➢ AppExchange directory -A Web directory where hundreds of Force.com
apps are available to Salesforce.com customers to review, demo, comment
upon, and/or install. Developers can submit their apps for listing on the
AppExchange directory if they want to share them with the community.

➢ Building of Database
Force.com provides Database.com as another service where a developer can
create a database required for an app.
➢ Connection to the database
By using Salesforce metadata API the database is then connected to the app
and used to store information in real time as per the app requirements and
customer base.
➢ Developer IDE
I. Online Page Editor and App Setup
II. Force.com IDE or Eclipse Plugin
III. Using the above, the app developer can create their app
effortlessly and Eclipse Plugin provides seamless onboarding
➢ Testing Environment
Force.com provides real time sandboxes that help test and debug in a separate
and real-based environment, without affecting the live business.
➢ Data centric apps can be developed in force.com platform.
➢ Data centric applications can be used in desktop databases like Microsoft Access.
➢ Data centric applications can be in large database management systems like
Oracle and MySQL.
➢ In force.com applications can be built in the form of plain text documents and
html.
➢ The most interesting part is that, Multiple users can access force.com platform
at a time.
➢ Collaborative application can be built with data and service which are
shared to multiple users in different locations.
➢ Web browser is only used to access any collaborative applications and no
software is required.

➢ Scalability
Most enterprises instinctively rely on Force.com due to its ability to aid the creation and
deployment of various social and mobile applications. Force.com can capably handle
an increasing amount of work load and also possesses the ability to enlarge itself in
order to accommodate any aggregate work.
The advantage that enterprises gain from Force.com is that due to its existence as
cloud-based platform. Enterprises do not have to purchase or invest in any kind of
hardware or software, and their business applications can run smoothly and
effectively with the benefit of data scalability, automated back-up and tuning.

➢ Pre-built Applications vs. Customized Applications

Force.com is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that enables enterprises to design and
build their own applications as well as customize or modify the standard applications.
Another major breakthrough is that all apps built under Force.com are instantly
compatible with mobile devices. This means that employees in an enterprise canaccess
information at the touch of a finger, while they are on the move.

➢ Underlying Frameworks
Force.com works with the help of some major frameworks that include programs and
software such as:
I. Apex: Apex is a programming language similar to Java that you can
use for creating and developing your applications.
II. Visualforce: Visualforce is used in the creation of UI (user
interface) applications.
III. Custom Objects: These also go by the name Database.com. These are
mainly used for data storage.