What is Salesforce?
- Salesforce was co-founded in the bay area in 1999 by Marc Benioff a former Oracle executive and Parker Harris, with goal is to provide CRM delivered over the internet, which is a radical change from the on-premises Server model.
- Salesforce later expanded to offer Apps built on its platform: PaaS.
- 3 points that made SF successful:
- 1- Industry agnostic
- 2-Most innovative for 4 years in a row, fastest growing Software company
- 3- Emerging technologies: newer products (marketing cloud, Wave..etc).
- CRM is a major offering of the Salesforce platform – 2 CRM product suites:
- Sales Cloud: sales and marketing tool to capture, quantity and sell new and recurring customers campaigns
- Service Cloud: processing support requests, validate support contracts, online knowledge base
- The other major offering is the Force.com platform: this is a PaaS offering where you can build your own Apps
- What is AppExchange? AppExchange contains Apps made by Salesforce and other parties- some free, some paid – ex: JobScience recruiting App. This is compared in the App Store of Apple, or Google Play of Google, where you can get free or paid Apps.
- Features:
- Chatter (social media of Salesforce),
- Universal search (search any term and it will display the result)
- Reports and Dashboard (collection of reports in 1 page – you can schedule reports to your inbox)
- Social profile (can see customer social media pages in Salesforce)
- SalesForce1 (mobile), integration with email client. Config features:- Page Layout: simple page change,
- Custom fields and Objects: add field easily
- Validation rules: require a field only when stage is lost
- Workflow rules: email notification when stage is lost
- Approval Process: manager approves an opportunity over 100K USD
- Robust Security: which user can see what
- Multi-currency Development features
- Code: Visualforce and Apex – used to create custom pages and advanced logic
What is Cloud Computing?
- One of the major characteristics of Salesforce is that it is purely Cloud based, without any on-premises option.
- Cloud computing is a model that enables convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability.
- 5 essential characteristics of Cloud Computing:
- On-demand self-service: you can start small, and pay as you grow.
- Broad network access: not only http, but IP based
- Resource pooling
- Rapid elasticity
- Measured Service
- 3 service models:
- Software as a Service (SaaS) – Office 365, Salesforce CRM (Sales and Service Cloud)
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) – developers who want to build apps (Force.com platform)
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – servers, storage, routing
- SaaS is a subscription delivery model. As a consumer of a SaaS product, you pay a recurring fee for access to a service/software (e.g. yearly licenses for Salesforce.com). This is a flavor of Cloud computing. Other flavors are IaaS and Paas. IaaS offers just the Infrastructure, PaaS offer the infrastructure in addition to the runtime platform that allows you to create your Application.
- Multitenancy: The term “software multitenancy” refers to a software architecture in which a single instance of software runs on a server and serves multiple tenants. A tenant is a group of users who share a common access with specific privileges to the software instance. With a multitenant architecture, a software application is designed to provide every tenant a dedicated share of the instance – including its data, configuration, user management, tenant individual functionality and non-functional properties. Multitenancy contrasts with multi-instance architectures, where separate software instances operate on behalf of different tenants.
Salesforce organizes data into objects and records. You can think of objects like a tab on a spreadsheet, and record like a single row of data.
Salesforce CRM allows businesses to manage and access data in sophisticated ways that could never be done with a simple spreadsheet. Records can be linked together to show how data is related, providing businesses the larger picture.
Salesforce Terminology
What are Tabs, Objects, Fields and Records?
Term | Definition |
Record | An item you are tracking in your database; if your data is like a spreadsheet, then a record is a row on the spreadsheet |
Field | A place where you store a value, like a name or address; using our spreadsheet example, a field would be a column on the spreadsheet |
Object | A table in the database; in that spreadsheet example, an object is a tab on the spreadsheet |
Org | Short for “organization,” the place where all your data, configuration, and customization lives. You log in to access it. You might also hear this called “your instance of Salesforce” |
App | A set of fields, objects, permissions, and functionality to support a business process |
Accounts | Accounts are the companies you’re doing business with. You can also do business with individual people (like solo contractors) using something called Person Accounts. |
Contacts | Contacts are the people who work at an Account. They do not have access to log into Salesforce. |
Leads | Leads are potential prospects. You haven’t yet qualified that they are ready to buy or what product they need. You don’t have to use Leads, but they can be helpful if you have team selling, or if you have different sales processes for prospects and qualified buyers. |
Opportunities | Opportunities are qualified leads that you’ve converted. When you convert the Lead, you create an Account and Contact along with the Opportunity. |
Users | People internal to your organization who log into Salesforce, e.g. salespeople |
Salesforce Releases:
- Salesforce updates their platform 3 times per year (winter, spring, summer), and includes new features or other improvements.
- All Salesforce orgs are automatically updated with the latest release (according to the release schedule emailed to administrators) for free.
- Winter
- Spring
- Summer
- As an administrator, it is a best practice to read through the release notes to see which improvements can be applied within your organization. See the Getting Certified for information on recent releases.
Get hands-on Salesforce Experience:
- Grow where you are planted: if your current organization uses Salesforce, ask for a Delegated Admin role to manage a group of users in your office, just add this to your job role without any pay increase
- Sign-up to volunteer administering an organization.
- If you have a non-profit organization, you can get a free 10-user non-profit Salesforce organization
- Get a Developer account – more info below.
Developer Account:
- As you will see in the coming chapters, Salesforce Sales Cloud Developer Edition is a Free basic edition that offers up to 2 Salesforce CRM user licenses, and 5 MB of data. You also have 3 force.com user licenses, and many other user licenses.
- The Developer Edition is very important to apply the concepts in this course, it is almost identical to the Enterprise Edition, but without any Sandbox support and with the user license and data restriction mentioned above.
- To create a Developer Edition account, go to: https://developer.salesforce.com/signup
- You can have multiple Developer Edition accounts using the same email address but different Usernames
- The Username should be in an email format, but not necessarily a valid email, as any email will be sent to the email address specified at the top
- After creating your account, you may visit the Getting Started page: https://developer.salesforce.com/gettingstarted for links to:
- Trailhead: Learn Force.com basics with Trailhead, a fun and fast way to challenge yourself. Celebrate your progress with points and badges!
Salesforce Certifications Summary
- Administrators:
- Administrator: recommended course: ADM201
- Advanced Administrator: Admin is pre-requisite. Recommended: ADM211
- App Builders:
- Platform App Builder: no pre-requisite – course recommended: DEV401 (building App with Force.com and Visualforce) – no coding needed – replaced the Force.com Developer
- Developers – replaced the Advanced Developer:
- Platform Developer 1: Apex and Visualforce
- Platform Developer 2: multiple choice essay (need to book a window)
- Implementation Expert:
- Sales Cloud Consultant: overlaps with the Administrator exam. Needs it as pre-requisite.
- Service Cloud Consultant: overlaps with the Administrator exam. Needs it as pre-requisite.
- Pardot Consultant (B2B Marketing)
- Marketing Cloud
Success Community:
Engage with and get answers from a passionate community of talented experts
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- Post your questions to the Community: Engage with and get answers from a passionate community of customers, partners and Salesforce experts.
- Browse official documentation: Visit our library of online help, guides, how-to videos, and articles to learn new skills and solve problems.
- Join the conversation: Find and follow interesting people, join groups for discussion and share files publicly or privately.
- Ideas – Share and vote for ideas to improve the product.
- AppExchange: Extend your success in the cloud with the AppExchange, a marketplace of business applications and consulting partners.
- Post jobs and find qualified professionals: Check out the Developer Marketplace to find qualified professionals waiting to help make your implementation a success.