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DermotR several basic questions
Hi there
I've suggested salesforce.com as a solution to the problems faced by 2 of my clients (2 very different businesses). I am using my developer edition account to perform the customizations.
I have several questions about my way of working.
1. How do I know what edition my client will to purchase? I've asked my sf.com account manager here in Dublin but I havent been able to get a satisfactory answer. I need to be able to tell my client, as soon as possible how much the thing will cost.
2. The approach I am using is to create a custom application for each client. Is this the correct approach?
3. If I add a new field (for example) to a standard object in one application, how can I keep this from appearing everywhere else that object turns up?
4. Upon completing customization work, how can I deploy this application (privately) to my clients salesforce.com installation (the only way I can think of doing it at the moment is by publishing to the appexchange?
5. I need to provide features to my customers to allow them to generate an invoice (*.doc) or an excel-based report. Is this possible.
Apologies if there is a lot in this, but I've been trying to get started for awhile and I'm finding the process less then intuitive.
Regards
Dermot
I've suggested salesforce.com as a solution to the problems faced by 2 of my clients (2 very different businesses). I am using my developer edition account to perform the customizations.
I have several questions about my way of working.
1. How do I know what edition my client will to purchase? I've asked my sf.com account manager here in Dublin but I havent been able to get a satisfactory answer. I need to be able to tell my client, as soon as possible how much the thing will cost.
2. The approach I am using is to create a custom application for each client. Is this the correct approach?
3. If I add a new field (for example) to a standard object in one application, how can I keep this from appearing everywhere else that object turns up?
4. Upon completing customization work, how can I deploy this application (privately) to my clients salesforce.com installation (the only way I can think of doing it at the moment is by publishing to the appexchange?
5. I need to provide features to my customers to allow them to generate an invoice (*.doc) or an excel-based report. Is this possible.
Apologies if there is a lot in this, but I've been trying to get started for awhile and I'm finding the process less then intuitive.
Regards
Dermot
Hello in Ireland. You can find a lot of the answers you are looking for on our Web site, and you probably should consider getting some training on Salesforce to help you understand some of the basics.
1 - Editions are described here.
2 - Not sure if you need a custom application or simply adding customizations to the existing Salesforce application. You probably want to spend some time learning about customization capabilities, and this book will fill you in on creating custom applications.
3 - You should get familiar with the use of page layouts, which control what fields appear on what tabs.
5 - You can access data in a salesforce database from Excel using the Excel connector. Salesforce also has a report writer, which, depending on your layout requirements, coud do the trick. Finally, you can access data in a salesforce database through our API.
Hope this helps.
- Rick Greenwald
Developer Evangelist
Hi Rick, thanks alot for your responses.
Just some other comments / and questions.
re: editions. I suppose it's more of a new feature request than a question per se: It would be nice (when customizing a customers deployment) to see what edition is required in order for the customer to have access to all of the customized features at the end of their free trial. For example, if I've added some custom objects, maybe some apex code and some workflow stuff, this could push the edition into "professional" or "enterprise". I expect this would be trivial enough to implement on the platform, and would let me tell the user how much they will have to pay, rather than my having to cross-check the features used with the feature comparison table. I could be missing something here though??.
re: custom applications (in developer edition account) versus "in-line" (customer trial-version deployment) . What I'm getting at here is that I would like to have a central repository for all of the different customized deployments. So, for example, my workflow would be: 1. gather requirements and make modifications in a new "custom application" in my developer edition account. 3. "publish" application to my clients deployment. (this means that I could potentially roll out the same solution to multiple customers, but without necessarily have my applications available on the appexchange
And 2 new questions!!
1. I want to submit a web service request from an external php form to salesforce. The basics are fine (thanks to the excellent site http://www.mikesimonds.com/ [thanks mike!!]).However, I would like to create (in additon to a contact and an account object) an instance of a custom object that i've defined in my clients salesforce deployment. Is there any means to achieve this using a web service call? (or by some other means, for that matter)
2. I really like some of the new features, particular SOA stuff and Apex in general. If i build these features into a custom application, can users who install these applications use these features, notwithstanding the fact that the features in question might not have been officially released?
Thanks again (apologies for long-windedness)
Dermot