June 15, 2009: Salesforce.com CRM is offering another layer of
wrapping for its core customer relationship management (CRM)
software-as-a-service, hoping to expand its role as a service
provider.
The company has announced official availability of Force.com
Sites, which lets you build websites using Salesforce.com's Apex
programming language and host them on its massive data farms.
Force.com Sites was unveiled last December and has been in beta
with 85 organizations since February.
To ramp up traffic, Salesforce.com CRM is offering free hosting for
sites serving up less than 250,000 page views a month to less
than 100 users. The package includes one custom application, up
to 10 customer objects per user, and a sandboxed development
environment.
After that, there's an Salesforce.com CRM enterprise edition that provides 500,000
monthly page views for $50 per user and an unlimited edition that
provides one million page views at $75 a user. You'll pay an
extra $1,000 per month for each additional batch of million page
views, Salesforce.com CRM said.
Salesforce.com CRM hopes to hook Apex users through its Visualforce
component framework that lets you program sites using HTML,
Javascript, CSS, and Flash staples, which will tie back to the
Salesforce.com platform's storage layer. Salesforce.com CRM said it's
providing extra tags so developers can tie their pages into the Salesforce.com CRM platform's database.cBut there's no support for programming using web-favorite PHP or
Microsoft's .NET.
The company sees Force.com Sites as a natural extension of its
CRM SaaS, giving users the ability to build things like forms for
order fulfillment and applications for jobs, with data and
information feeding back into customers' existing Salesforce.com CRM
applications. The company claimed the American Red Cross, Dell, Haifords,
Kaiser Permanente, Yahoo!, and Starbucks as participants during
the beta phase.
Source: Gavin Clarke Link
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