In our previous article we learnt that Force.com is a platform for developers offered by Salesforce.com for building and running business applications in their cloud. Now let us read in bit more detail to learn what all exactly you can do using the platform.
All businesses, big or small, have variety of requirements to keep track of information, pass it on to different departments for approvals, query and run report on it, etc, etc. There is no single off-the-shelf platform that can accommodate everyone's unique requirement. Force.com platform attempts to give an easy solution for this common business problem. The platform allows an easy way to quickly create powerful applications, all from your browser, to meet your business application needs.
The Force.com platform offers a simple point and click method of building applications. The various parts of the platform can be summarized as below -
Force.com platform provides Standard Objects such as Account, Contact, and User. Platform allows you to customize these objects as well as create new custom objects. These objects, either standard or custom, are the components that model the data you need to store in your application. Though they are very closely matching to the Relational Database Table definitions, defining them is way simple here. You are not writing any SQL to create them. You simply point and click in the platform to create or customize the objects.
Platform allows you to easily define security sharing rules for the data. 1. Object Level Security - You can define object permissions to prevent a user from reading, creating or editing an instance of a particular type of object. 2. Field Level Security - You can define access so that a user is prevented from reading, creating or editing the value for a particular field of an object. 3. Record Level Security - You can also define access on the individual records. You may provide object level access but restrict access on certain records in it.
Force.com automatically generates user interface based on the object definitions. Generates very sophisticated pages including variety of field controls. Page layout editor allows you to customize these pages further. If this fastest and easiest point and click method is not enough to meet your needs you can build your own pages from scratch.
The point and click workflow and approval engine allows you to define rules to perform actions automatically when certain changes occur. Platform can send out emails, assign tasks, update field values. Platform can also send messages to other applications in the cloud.
Force.com platform allows you to generate 3 different types of report - Tabular, Summary, Matrix. Report is generated using the real time data and can include filters, groupings and customized graphs.
As we can see these are quite a set of features giving ability to build a powerful, robust and secure business application. And the thing is one can quickly put together all of these just by point and click method.
We will be exploring all of these features further in depth in our future articles.
Happy cloud computing using Salesforce!
All businesses, big or small, have variety of requirements to keep track of information, pass it on to different departments for approvals, query and run report on it, etc, etc. There is no single off-the-shelf platform that can accommodate everyone's unique requirement. Force.com platform attempts to give an easy solution for this common business problem. The platform allows an easy way to quickly create powerful applications, all from your browser, to meet your business application needs.
The Force.com platform offers a simple point and click method of building applications. The various parts of the platform can be summarized as below -
Data Storage
Force.com platform provides Standard Objects such as Account, Contact, and User. Platform allows you to customize these objects as well as create new custom objects. These objects, either standard or custom, are the components that model the data you need to store in your application. Though they are very closely matching to the Relational Database Table definitions, defining them is way simple here. You are not writing any SQL to create them. You simply point and click in the platform to create or customize the objects.
Data Security
User Interface
Force.com automatically generates user interface based on the object definitions. Generates very sophisticated pages including variety of field controls. Page layout editor allows you to customize these pages further. If this fastest and easiest point and click method is not enough to meet your needs you can build your own pages from scratch.
Process Automation
The point and click workflow and approval engine allows you to define rules to perform actions automatically when certain changes occur. Platform can send out emails, assign tasks, update field values. Platform can also send messages to other applications in the cloud.
Reports
Force.com platform allows you to generate 3 different types of report - Tabular, Summary, Matrix. Report is generated using the real time data and can include filters, groupings and customized graphs.
As we can see these are quite a set of features giving ability to build a powerful, robust and secure business application. And the thing is one can quickly put together all of these just by point and click method.
We will be exploring all of these features further in depth in our future articles.
Happy cloud computing using Salesforce!
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