June 16, 2009: The initiative lets customers build Web applications and, if they
wish, their own branded Web site to be operated on the
Salesforce.com infrastructure.
Salesforce.com often signs up customers who come to its Force.com
set of tools and build their first application online. So Salesforce.com is making that experience free through a new
offering on Monday, Force.com Free Edition.
An application with up to 100 authenticated employee users or up
to 250,000 public page views per month will be hosted for free.
When traffic moves above those points, Salesforce.com charges $25
per user per month or $1,000 per month for up to one million
external visitor views.
"We can't think of a better way to accelerate the adoption of our
platform than to make the first application on us," said Ariel
Kelman, senior director of Salesforce platform product marketing,
in an interview.
Salesforce.com is pairing its Force.com Free Edition application
building capability with a Force.com Sites offering that allows a
customer to mount an application as an employee-facing or
public-facing Web site on Salesforce's infrastructure. In the
past, the firm has offered CRM and ERP applications that could be
customized and still run on its site. Now it's letting customers
build both Web applications and, if they wish, their own branded
Web site to be operated on the Salesforce.com infrastructure.
Kelman cited as an example the Starbucks Pledge5 Web site, built
in three weeks to allow the Starbucks CEO to announce it on the
eve of President Barack Obama's inauguration day. The site lists
volunteer projects in each user's zip code and asks them to
pledge five hours of community service to one of them. Built with Salesforce.com tools on the Salesforce.com infrastructure, Kelman
said the site experienced three million views in its first day of
operation.
He called the latter an example of how Salesforce.com is moving
beyond software as a service into cloud computing. Force.com Free
Edition Sites adds a simple Web page building process to the
standard tools that Salesforce has already made available to
customers to build customizations and mash-ups of its existing
applications. The pages are built with standard Web technologies,
such as HTML and JavaScript, and given extra tags that can be
used to display them in sequence.
Building A Database
That also means customers will be expected to build a structured,
database-oriented application using the database options that
come with the Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM).com site, such as defining a "customer" database object or other objects. The applications
would have built in security and scalability provided by Salesforce.com's site. Additional business logic may be produced in Salesforce.com's
Apex language.
A recruitment application could be built to post a firm's jobs
available. The application could find such jobs in the company
database and take applications, but could shield the company
database from queries on how much the current holder of the job
is paid and the name of the recruiting manager who will make the
final decision. Kelman said Salesforce.com keeps adding tools to
give its customers "fine-grained control" over what data is
coming into or leaving the company database.
Customers test applications in a Salesforce.com sandbox, where errors
or violations of Salesforce's existing programming methods are
detected and prevented from going into production. Kelman said Salesforce.com hasn't added to its data center
infrastructure to make the offering. It already has the spare
capacity to meet the anticipated demand.
Source: Charles Babcock Link
Related: CRM
Sales Force
Marketing
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