After hearing a lot of talk about "Cloud Computing" and also about "Sales Force" I decided to look more into SalesForce this weekend. After my brief experience with salesforce.com, though a very interesting and intriguing one, I decided to blog about it in a series of Posts as I am quite positive that I will be playing around with it for the next 2-3 weeks.

So my first step was to look at http://www.SalesForce.com. And there was a lot of information there and when I mean lots, I literally mean tones and tones of information. So there was cloud computing, Apex, Visual Force, SalesForce CRM, Force.com, AppExchange, Platform as a Service(Paas), Software as a Service (SaaS) and much more…. One thing that I really liked about the website though was the way the contents were organized…

So being a developer at heart I started with the developer tab and soon realized that I had plenty of good material to start with. I was able to get my own space for developing, playing around with SalesForce and of course learning, by registering with SalesForce. I downloaded all the materials from the developer Wiki (which you get access to after registration).

I realized that I had to first learn more about the "SalesForce CRM application" before I got into their Cloud Computing or Apex or Visual Force. So I started with the Tutorial from the book "Force.Com_Fundamentals.pdf" that was part of the pdf's I had downloaded. The CRM application is built upon the Force platform.

Over a period of 1-2 hours, I was able to complete 6 chapters of that book (over 120 pages) and also develop and implement all the features in the book in my own development work spaceJ. Here are some snapshots of the cool CRM Portal I had built so far for the Human Resources Recruiting Portal.

So basically the 6 chapters I went through were

1. Fundamentals
2. Sample Recruiting Application
3. Reviewing Database Concepts
4. Building a Simple App
5. Enhancing the Simple App with Advanced Fields and Page Layouts
6. Expanding the Simple App using Relationships

SharePoint vs Salesforce

Having worked with SharePoint for the last year, I should say that most of the things looked very much like SharePoint. Instead of Sites there were Tabs, Instead of Content Types there were Objects(well sort of as Objects are also Tabs in SalesForce), instead of "Site Columns" there were "Fields" and instead of "List Items" you had "Records"

But what impressed me the most about SalesForce.com which I have not found in SharePoint is the ability to have a relational data feature that is very limited in SharePoint. I also liked the fact that you don't have to worry about the deployment to the SharePoint server (custom trust policies, cab file, manifest file..etc etc ). One thing that is difficult to beat is the integration of SharePoint with Word, excel, PowerPoint. Yet to see how SalesForce addresses that.

Looking forward to get into more depth on Security, custom code and reports very soon….

HTH

Hari