Practical Salesforce Architecture

Chapter 1. Main Application Functionality and Capabilities

It’s really hard to understand an ecosystem without establishing some boundaries and definitions. As a systems person, I will frequently refer to things inside and outside of a virtual ecosystem. The terms are fluid. Branding often overlaps with functionality. From a practitioner’s standpoint, you may not clearly see where the edges are, and over time those edges will become even less perceivable. I will try to explain what type of “inside” and “outside” I am referring to as we go. Be ready to dump out your glass and reset as you read.

These first chapters will focus more on defining the boundary concepts than teaching where or how to use them. Once you know that the bowl contains milk and not white paint, you should know what to do with it. By the end of this chapter, you should have a decent frame of reference for further learning. The outline of the whole Salesforce ecosystem should be clear, and you should have some understanding of the depth of its capabilities.

Salesforce and Clouds

When learning about the Salesforce ecosystem, the first rule is to set aside your preconceptions about a lot of terminology. Cloud is one of the most egregiously misused terms in all of modern IT, and it’s a very polymorphic term inside the ecosystem. Learning to put a special fnord around any specific definition is essential to absorbing the many paradigms represented within it.

Salesforce started out as a web-based application like ...