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hurdra Need Info on SiteForce vs Force.com Sites
Hello,
I was not able to go to Dreamforce 11, but I got a email newsletter from Salesforce.com that provided a link to some of the DF11 technical sessions that are posted on YouTube. The one that immediately caught my attention was the one about SiteForce. Rather than wade through an hour-long presentation, though, I thought I'd try to get info directly from Salesforce.com. If you go to the SiteForce promo page (http://www.salesforce.com/platform/siteforce/), you see a "Sign Me Up" button, and "Pricing & Editions" link under a "Next Steps" box, both of which take you to the promo page for Force.com (http://www.salesforce.com/platform/platform-edition/). Naturally, I was confused by this, so I tried to use SF.com's live chat to get an answer; the rep that I spoke to barely knew what I was talking about, and certainly was not helpful.
Does anyone here know if this is just a repackaging of Force.com Sites, or is this something truly new? Furthermore, would this be available in a testing version via your developer site, or is this something only available with a full-scale SF.com CRM license? As someone who does Web sites for smaller scale businesses on the side occasionally, I can see the potential for this being a replacement for the traditional "web host" type site, if it's affordable.
It's a 100% different product. Some of the infrastructure is the same, but from a product perspective it is very different.
Force.com Sites is Apex/Visualforce. It's aimed at technical users who are comfortable with HTML, CSS, and code.
Siteforce is for a wider range of users. It's declarative and a new way to build websites. I encourage you to checkout the webinar on Monday to learn more: http://blogs.developerforce.com/developer-relations/2011/10/siteforce-webinar-next-monday-october-31st.html
Hi have the same concerns regarding the page http://www.salesforce.com/platform/siteforce/
It clearly states to me that the cost for siteforce is $50 a month for enterprise and $75 a month for unlimited.
So I tried out the demo in a trial org. It looks good, I like what I see.
Now I ask my salesforce.com rep to add it to my org only to be told it is $18,000 a year for siteforce! But if I act now I can get it for the bargain price of $9900 a year.
Did I miss something here?
That is simply outrageous, especially since this product is only good enough to do a very basic Web site, according to the webinar I attended the other day. Once again, Salesforce.com is targeting the wrong market - i.e. convincing non-technical people that they can do techical work simply by owning a tool. That's like selling me an easy-to-use scapel and telling me I can now do surgery. There is simply so much more to building usable, useful sites than adding graphics to a page, dragging a list of products into a repeater, and selecting publish. I stated in my follow up survey that SF.com needs to rethink this as a comprehensive tool marketed to DEVELOPERS, not business users, that is essentially an online version of IDEs like Visual Studio. Regardless, this pricing is prohibitive, even for large corporations; you could easily design, develop, host and publish the demo site they used in the webinar for about $3500 - $5000.
My thoughts exactly.
What small company (which seems to be who this is being marketed too) in their right mind would spend $9900 A YEAR to thave thier website hosted?
Simply outragous.
Orchestra CMS which is on the force.com platform is something like $700 a year per site.
Here's a quick comparison from my initial research:
* Supports controlled contributor or "content editor" access to pages after they've been built
* Developer must edit content on pages or build own CMS controls
The feature I'd like to see, which appears to be missing, is the ability to create a custom visualforce component and add it to the library of building blocks visible to SiteForce editor users.
- Ron