Chapter 21. Extending Salesforce Beyond CRM

In This Chapter

  • Understanding the Force.com platform

  • Creating apps on Force.com

  • Deploying Force.com apps for your company

What if you could modify your business applications in minutes to match the unique ways you manage your customer relationships? How much more productive could you be if you spent less time fighting your technology — and more time with your customers?

Force.com is Salesforce's platform for customizing and creating your on-demand applications by simply pointing-and-clicking your mouse on easy-to-use Web pages. In fact, with Force.com, you can not only customize your existing Salesforce applications, but also now build entirely new applications to fit the way you do business. If you need a little inspiration, you can also install a pre-existing solution from the AppExchange directory.

In this chapter, we demystify the Force.com platform and define some basic terms to give you a glimpse of the awesome power of creating custom apps. Then you see how you can share your creation on the AppExchange (www.appexchange.com). Finally, we offer simple and critical tips for preparing your deployment game plan.

Understanding the Force.com Platform

Force.com is salesforce.com's on-demand platform, a suite of development tools for customizing, building, integrating, and installing business applications — and you don't need to build or maintain any infrastructure yourself.

Force.com is both a platform of tools and an underlying infrastructure. ...

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