Introduction to Salesforce

Today the world is leaded by Cloud computing. Salesforce.com is one of the way for moving all your applications to cloud. There are lots of question running in your mind that what is salesforce? what are its features? what are the benifits of moving apps to salesforce. So to answer your questions, here is a small article which would help you find your answers. I have tried here to answer all these questions in a simple manner.

Salesforce :

Salesforce is a global enterprise software company Best known for its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) .

Customer Relationship Management

• CRM is a widely implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects.
• The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service.

 Salesforce.com's CRM solution is broken down into several broad categories: 

• Sales Cloud,
• Service Cloud
• Data Cloud  
• Collaboration Cloud (including Chatter)
• Custom Cloud (including Force.com).

  The above are the salesforce CRM's broad categories but what do they mean? Lets understand these temrs in details.

The Sales Cloud

• This application runs in the cloud, so the user can access it anywhere through an Internet-enabled mobile device or a connected computer.
• The Sales Cloud includes a real-time sales collaborative tool called Chatter. provides sales representatives with a complete customer profile and account history, allows the user to manage marketing campaign spending and performance across a variety of channels from a single application.
• Automatic email reminders can be scheduled to keep teams up to date on the latest information.

The Service Cloud

• The Service Cloud provides companies with a call center-like view that enables companies to create and track cases coming in from every channel, and automatically route and escalate what’s important.
• The Salesforce CRM-powered customer portal provides customers the ability to track their own cases 24 hours a day, includes a social networking plug-in that enables the user to join the conversation about their company on social networking websites, provides analytical tools and other services including email services, chatting tools, Google search, and access to customers' entitlement and contracts.

The Data Cloud

• The data cloud provides the provision to store large amount of data.
• Data cloud for Salesforce has the most complete and accurate company and contact data which can be found in one place.
• Sales and marketing people get instant access to every detail they need.
• The data is always up-to-date because it’s in the cloud—and it’s only a click away because it’s inside Salesforce.

The Collaboration Cloud 

The collaboration cloud comprises of the powerfull tool chatter which we described in the sales cloud.

Custom Cloud

• The custom cloud consist of the Force.com platform.
• It  is Salesforce.com's PaaS product.
• The platform allows external developers to create add-on applications that integrate into the main salesforce.com application and are hosted on salesforce.com's infrastructure.

These applications are built using Apex (a proprietary Java-like programming language for the Force.com platform) and Visualforce (an XML-like syntax for building user interfaces in HTML, Ajax or Flex).