Salesforce; Force to Be Reckoned With
Hello there! Today I’m going to be talking about the ever growing concept that is Salesforce. It’s a company. It’s a framework. It’s a platform. It’s a programming language. It’s a way of life? Some would say so.
Salesforce the company was established in 1999. Since then, it has become a gargantuan in the field of what is known as CRM. CRM stands for customer relationship management. This is a bit of an amorphous term that encompasses a bunch of things, but is largely concerned with keeping track of a companies varying relationships with its various customers. A CRM tool can tell you how many of your customers in the past six months bought twice as many onions as they normally do. A CRM tool can tell you what kind of products your newest customers are buying. More than keeping track of all this data, optimally a CRM should be able to analyze it as well, and give the user insights about what trends might be occurring in their business.
Salesforce comes into all this as the leading CRM tool. Since 1999 it has grown to fill a large part of the market share and has diversified in the ways that it is able to help companies. The platform itself is a massive cloud based database that holds records and information for countless companies. Moreover this platform is highly customizable. An intrepid Salesforce engineer can set up a custom platform for any company that’s able to provide pertinent details that are particularly of interest to whatever industry the client company might be in. Salesforce is also a platform for the creation of what are called “enterprise applications.” These are tools that companies use to make whatever work they’re doing easier and more efficient. By already having much of the infrastructure needed to run these sort of applications, Salesforce is fertile ground for the creation of these custom apps. Moreover, if the company in question is already hooked into their own Salesforce CRM platform, all the cogent details are already available to the enterprise application by virtue of the fact that they operate on the same platform. The language used to create these enterprise applications is known as Apex, and it is a declarative language with some similarities to Java. Declarative, in this context, means that the functionality for whatever app isn’t necessarily hard coded from the group up, but rather its functionality is “declared” and the Salesforce platform is able build out the code for that behind the scenes.
This same declarative ideology is employed with data manipulation and retrieval. As opposed to using something like the obtuse and byzantine SQL syntax that we learned about last week, a Salesforce is able to declare what values they want using Salesforce point-and-click platform, and Salesforce’s backend is able to pull out all this data on its own.
Making Salesforce even easier to use is the fact that it has its own free to use tutorial platform online called Trailhead where users can pick up the technical skills required to operate the behemoth that is Salesforce.
And that’s a little bit about Salesforce. Hope you’ve enjoyed it and come back next week for some more code talk.
