I'm looking for a way to authenticate my self-service portal users (trouble-ticket area) without them actually logging into the self service site.  Does the login call published in the API work for these users?

Hi there,

We would like to run a local copy of the database to extend our report capabilities. Does Salesforce support any means of data replication?

We have MS SQL Server running locally. We would like to replicate the data to this server.

Thank you in advance.

The published Sforce API allows me to develop code that accesses data in a salesforce.com application database. This is quite different from being able to develop an entirely different application (for airline crew scheduling for instance), to deploy it on the sforce platform and hence make it available to the world at large as a hosted service. My reading of Sforce is that it is intended to support these kinds of "orthogonol, sforce-enabled, stand-alone applications" but I do not see any direct support for this at this point. Maybe I don't understand what is meant by sforce-enabled, stand-alone applications. Maybe we are still talking futures ... Can someone shed some light on this? Thanks in advance.