If you interestend in developing a custom web pages inside Salesforce, Visualforce might be a good way to do that, but still requires development skills, like tag editting.

Afrous Dashboard, which is recently published on AppExchange, might be an alternative solution when the pages are highly needed to be customized by the end users.

This application is really cool because ... please see this movie. You'll find that it's really like "iGoogle". You can create these full-Ajax web pages only by drag and drop operation. All salesforce standard objects (Account, Contact, Opportunities...) and even custom objects can be embedded as widgets.

Importantly, this application is using Visualforce and Force.com API, and entirely running on the Force.com platform. That is, no other outer servers are involved (=native). Recent salesforce update that enabled packaging of Visualforce and static resources enabled us to publish this application.

Also we're using JavaScript library "Ext JS", which is a popular Ajax widget library, included in the package as a static resource.

Please visit the AppExchange site and install it in your org (of cource, DE is OK). Even if you are a pure developer, this might be simply interesting how we did it on the Force.com platform. And see and meet us at Dreamforce ! We are holding the booth there.


Thanks,