This article gives an overview of Salesforce and the services that it provides. Salesforce is widely known for its popular CRM (Customer Relationship Management) services.
What is a CRM?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a system for maintaining and managing relationships between customers and the company. All kinds of interactions with the client - documents, emails, advertisements, surveys, actual sales etc. are easily managed by a CRM software. Even though all these tasks can be handled manually, a software provides more reliability, accuracy and convenience. All information can be managed at one place, summarized and categorized. Also, by use of dedicated software for CRM, as a business owner you can concentrate more on other important aspects. What a CRM provides you is freedom from having to employ your resources on the customer relationships front and look for more opportunities.
Salesforce is a cloud based CRM service provider, meaning that you can manage your CRM services anytime and from anywhere. A cloud based CRM system has several advantages over traditional CRMs. There is cost effectiveness, scalability, flexibility, access control, etc. As the system is on cloud, all your usage statistics are measured online based on the number of users and the features required. There is no need for any installation, thereby reducing hardware and infrastructure costs. Multiple users can access the same data and manage all information on the go. This increases flexibility and encourages collaboration.
Salesforce.com is a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) provider.
The Salesforce CRM consists of several products, or components, namely, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, App Exchange, Marketing Cloud, Work.com, Chatter etc.
Salesforce.com
It is the main service of Salesforce. It acts as an interface for its clients and customers. It provides companies with event, case and task management capabilities, along with additional services such as social networking plugins, analytical tools, email and chat services etc.
Salesforce1
It is the mobile application of Salesforce.
Force.com
Force.com is different from the SaaS provider Salesforce.com. Force.com is PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) that provides developers with the platform to host their applications that can be integrated with the main Salesforce.com services. The infrastructure is also provided by Salesforce.
Work.com
It is a service suitable for the workforce, that is aimed at boosting employee and sales performance through social networking, real time feedback etc. It was previously known as Rypple and is used primarily for managing human resources.
App Exchange
It is an online application marketplace where developers can buy any third party apps or sell their own apps that run on the Force.com platform.
Primary Technologies of Salesforce
Apex : A strongly typed OOP (Object Oriented Programming) language similar to Java. It is proprietary.
Visualforce : View control technology on Force.com platform.
Lightning : Component based framework that constitutes the front end of Salesforce platform.
Lightning App Builder : Tool for rapid application development of responsive web interfaces.
