Post on 17-Mar-2016
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Letter from the Editor
Welcome to Force Insight magazine!
Force Insight is about transforming your organization using the new IT capabilities provided by the Force.com platform.
By eliminating many of the obstacles that stand in the way of rapid solution delivery, Force opens up a wide range of new opportunities for every organization, regardless of size. It provides a springboard for innovation and creating new kinds of business relationships by enabling users to build solutions that were not feasible before.
But to fully realize the potential of the Force platform, it will not be enough to simply start building applica-tions and hope for the best. A tool alone will not transform an organization. It requires a holistic approach and a concerted effort to bring together all the necessary strands of strategy, methodology, mindset and support. Done right, the result will be a peak-performing, robust and sustainable organization.
Force Insight brings together, in a single place, the lead-ing thinkers and practitioners in this exciting new world. Articles cover new thinking in how to leverage the plat-form effectively, as well as examples of real world imple-mentations. These articles help business leaders estab-lish an agenda for discussion - and change - within their companies.
By publishing quarterly, readers can take advantage of the very latest ideas, practices and services. Being a hard copy allows Force Insight to rise above the noise
of online sites, and provide a comprehensive, periodic snapshot of accumulated knowledge. By specifically targeting the Force platform, the magazine can con-sistently provide highly relevant content to the reader.
These are exciting times, ripe with both challenges and opportunity. We look forward to helping you meet those challenges and take advantage of the opportunities by using the power of Force.com.
- Jonathan Sapir, Editor
Jonathan Sapir
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Purchase copies for your clients and prospectsPurchase copies in bulk for seminars, meetings, mailers, etc.
SubscribeAnyone can subscribe to Force Insight by going to www.ForceInsight.com.
Submit an articleForce users are encouraged to submit an article to Force Insight covering their experience with Force.
Purchase copies for your clients and prospectsPurchase copies in bulk for seminars, meetings, mailers, etc.
Key Points:
For Force Partners:
For Salesforce Sales and Marketing:
For Force Users:
• FocusedprimarilyonthebusinessaspectoftheForceplatform• AimedathelpingorganizationsleveragetheForceplatformtogrowtheirbusiness• Willbeusefulto: > All levels of management > Project leaders > Consultants > Knowledge workers > Analysts• Willbepublishedquarterly• Eacheditionwillbearound40pagesinlength• Willbeavailableforfreedistributionorsubscription
For more information, call: (312) 283-4419 or email: info@forceinsight.com
PrototypeForce Insight Magazine
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Contents
Summer2009
Message from Marc BenioffMarc welcomes Force Insight to the Force ecosystem.
Letter from the EditorWhy Force Insight? Why now?
The Mashup Corporations: The End of Business as Usual, by Andy Mulholland - Global CTO, CAP GeminiCloud computing is unleashing a raft of next-generation business models that will reorganize the planet. The author provides
a practical framework for re-architecting your business with force to take advantage of the new business opportunities.
Guerillas in the mist: Guerilla development practices in the cloud, by George Kenessey – CEO, AppiphonyHow one partner has adopted an already rapid development methodology to the unique characteristics of Force.
Streamline Marketing: Extending Salesforce with Force, by Michael Topalovich - CEO, Delivered InnovationHow one partner used Force to extend the power of Salesforce CRM.
Force Speaks: The Emergence of Force.comA far-ranging discussion with Force about how the Force platform was born and where it is going.
Case Study: Interview with Lance Haeberle, Studio ITStudioIT is the preeminent software application for the interior design industry. Lance tells us why, and how, he switched over
to Force.
Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and Force, by James Ward – Product Evangelist, AdobeThepowerofRIA:howAdobeFlexletsyouaddfullinteractivity,video,animations,etc.toyourForceapplications.
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SampleContents
The Situational Mindset: Closeness of FitSituational and traditional applications require different thinking. In this edition, we look at the situational concept of
“closeness of fit”.
Situational Patterns: Creating Raving Fans with ForceExamples of applications that can be built with Force that were not feasible in the past. In this edition, we look at innovative
applications designed to generate hyper customer enthusiasm.
Thinking Outside the Box: Complex Adaptive System Theory, by Jonathan Sapir – CEO, SilverTree SystemsWe all use paradigms to make sense of the world. But these paradigms can sometimes have the effect of limiting our vision.
In this series, we will look at different ways of making sense of the world and how it can lead you down innovative new paths.
Nodes in the Cloud: Amazon Web Services and Force.com, by Jeff Barr, AmazonHow to extend the power of Force using other cloud platforms. In this edition, we look at Amazon Web Services.
Solution Design Conundrums: Handling Casual UsersHow to address common (but complex) solution design issues. In this edition, we look at how to deal with applications that need
to cater for many casual users.
Product Review: CloudConverterCloudConverter is an application developed by Model Metrics to automate the process of migrating custom applications from
any database to salesforce.com’s Force.com Platform.
Book Review: Business AgilityBusiness Agility: Sustainable Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World by Michael Hugos reveals the principles of the agile
enterprise, backed by real-world case studies from the author’s own experience.
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The Force.com Platform: An Interview with Salesforce (Part 1)The following is a podcast originally conducted by Paul Miller. It has been slightly edited to be suitable for publication.
What was the rationale behind building a platform as opposed to offering applications like Salesforce?
SALESFORCE: There are two parts that have been
equally important. Ononeside,asweobtainmoreand
more customers with more and more sophisticated
requirements within the CRM domain, which of course is
where we started, we would frequently be asked how they
can get all the benefits of all the kind of customization and
integration that they have historically enjoyed with client
server technology or they have enjoyed where they have
full control over an environment and all of the different
moving parts and are able to kind of exercise all the
development that is part and parcel of that. How do they
get all that kind of capability while obtaining all of the
time to market and value and predictability benefits of the
software service model and that’s kind of one angle we
started thinking about when we started thinking about
the platform and first doing things like providing a web
services API, so that you could of course integrate your CRM
system with the other applications in your environment
behind the firewall or otherwise, being able to provide a
custom database capability, so that you could extend the
data model and schema of your CRM application with
whatever unique requirements that you might have.
So that was one very important branch of the kind of
history of the platform and of course if you look at our
customerbasenowandtheover55,000companiesthat
use salesforce.com, you can imagine that we wouldn’t
be able to satisfy their unique requirements and use
cases that we see across that audience unless we had
this customization and integration capability as part of
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our CRM offering, but equally important is really kind of
the founding principle of the company, which is this idea
of no software, this idea that really had its founding in the
understanding that we are fundamentally moving to a new
architecture, one that is internet centric for both delivering
and creating applications.
As you know, that logo we have doesn’t say no CRM
software, it says “no software”. So it has always been part
of the company’s DNA and vision to branch outside of CRM
and really think generically about how we move enterprise
applications from client server to what we now call the New
Cloud Model.
How far does the Force.com offering extend into the enterprise beyond CRM? Is anything in the enterprise up for grabs?
We certainly think a good chunk
of what’s being done in the
enterprise is up for grabs and I
think if you look at a good chunk
of what corporate IT developers
and corporate focused ISPs are
creating, frankly it’s a lot of you
know forms and workflow centric
applications. We could probably
see similarities in the kind of style and nature of enterprise
applications extending back to applications rendered in
green screen on mainframe terminals, then to applications
that maybe were built in a system like VB and Power Builder.
Again, very forms and workflow centric with analytics and
different kinds of components and what we have been able
to do with force.com is by virtue of creating this idea of a
multi-tenant database that can handle any schema, any
relational schema, have kind of a corresponding UI in forms
and business logic capabilities is allow any application
that could have again be expressed on those green screen
models in something again like a VB system now to be built
entirely on the cloud.
And by focusing on this idea of enterprise cloud computing,
we can really offer a much faster, both development life cycle
as well as obviously lower pain and lower cost deployment
life cycle for corporate IT than what’s been possible in the
previous architectures.
There are certain classes of customer who believe, whether
rightly or wrongly, that certain classes of data cannot leave their
data center. Are your customers expressing those same concerns
about security and not letting data out of their own data center
or are you managing to persuade them that actually they are
worrying about something that isn’t really as big a problem as
they think it is?
SALESFORCE: The fundamental and appropriate question
that businesses ask when they look at
software as a service and platform as a
service and have been asking for the past
ten years is: is the service trusted and
secure? I think it’s absolutely incumbent
on service providers like salesforce.com
and Google and Amazon and others to
provide the kind of trusted reliability that
will let customers know that they can store
their data with our services and we are
very proud of our track record and we are
very proud of what we have been able to.
If we were to wind the clock back to the beginning of those
ten years, are there a lot of people talking about why SaaS
would never happen and why companies would never trust
a service provider to run an application or to manage some
data for them and you know what happens every year is the
set of applications and the set of data that people will say will
never go to the cloud, inevitably gets smaller and smaller and
smaller and smaller and I think if you look at the relatively short
history of our industry, the on demand and SaaS industry, it’s
a history of people saying you know finance applications will
never move to the cloud or HR applications will never move to
the cloud or custom applications will never move to the cloud
and in each one of those categories, we have seen over time
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