Practical Salesforce Architecture

Chapter 12. Salesforce Well-Governed

The Salesforce platform is extremely mature in many areas. It’s especially competent for small to medium-sized implementations. When you’re unlocking all of the power of the platform for large sets of functionality or customization, you will need to build processes to suit the situation. In this chapter we will discuss some of the governance challenges you may face with Salesforce and how to deal with them. These aren’t necessarily weaknesses of the platform, just areas that you should plan for. I have covered some of these topics in the previous chapters while discussing different features. Here, we’ll expand on these extra patterns you may need to follow if you plan to grow. This should also help you predict which growth frameworks you might want to adopt before doing so becomes difficult. My primary goal, as in the previous chapters, is to enable a better understanding of the Salesforce platform. Most of the solutions presented here are common sense once you fully understand all the components in play.

Most of the topics discussed here tie back to a common theme of potential technical debt. These types of debt are possible due to a combination of features or gaps in the Salesforce platform, and not all of them will be relevant to your situation. We will look at many of the challenges you may face and talk about a few of the ways to solve (or at least attenuate) them. These approaches are not one-size-fits-all, and this chapter is not intended ...