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Brian HaugheyBrian Haughey 

Does user interaction have to happen on Salesforce.com?

Naive question here, cart before the horse and all that....

I just got done with a Udacity tutorial and would like to build something slightly similar, that gathers a list of real world festivals, but allow for some user features (mainly email notification for reminders of the event date, etc.)

I'm not sure if this would translate to the App Store or if I can just host the information on a website, and have users interact with it there.

Is this all built so that users (or users within the particular business) would have to log onto Salesforce.com to do stuff like change inventory, etc., or is there a "port" aspect?

Sorry if my questions are all jumbled, I'm just basically trying to get going and tinker with Salesforce, but if it's gonna cost me money to have an active setup, then I'll just play around inside my free developer account.

Please be gentle :)
SonamSonam (Salesforce Developers) 
Hey Brian, welcome to the salesforce world :)

Salesforce does word on per user basis, that is, users need to login to the ORG setup to be able to check the data stored in salesforce.Apart from storing data, users can also run analysis on that data and have their business processes implemented in Salesforce(approvals, automatic email notifications etc).

However, if you wish to user the salesforce APIs, that is, accessing Salesforce data without users coming to the UI - this is also possible through APIs - these give you the flexibility to access the data with authencaton driven via APIs.

If this interests you do let me know and I will help you with some docs that will give you more clarity.