BMC Service Desk on Force.com

I have been working on this product for last 10 months. Its been a highly enriching experience for me. I have got exposure on both insights of Force.com and ITIL Service Desk product.

About the Product

A conventional help desk application resides in-house on a client or network server. As with any traditional application, the installation, care, and feeding of the application is the responsibility of the business. In contrast, Service Desk on force.com resides on force.com platform—accessed through the Internet (the “cloud”)— that are professionally maintained. The application is, in fact, an online service. This cloud applications can be accessed from any connected machine, from anywhere in the world using an ordinary Web browser.

Typically licensed by subscription, Service Desk on Force.com application dispenses with the installation and endless upgrade patches that plague most IT departments. When end users sign in, the latest version of the application is already available.

The Application is also available for mobile phones i.e. Blackberry and iphone. The iphone app can be downloaded from app store and the blackberry app comes with the package which can be extracted by the administrator and distributed among the users. Recently new features such as Change Management, Projected Service Outage and Problem Management have been added to the product which has made it as competent as any other cloud service desk in the market.

The Key Technologies used in the Application are

1. Apex and VisualForce (Fundamental Force.com Technologies)

2. Ext Js 3.0

3. Ajax and SOAP Web-services

DAS (Database as Service)

Over View
Today, efficient data processing is a fundamental and vital issue for almost every scientific, academic, or business organization. Therefore the organizations end up installing and managing database management systems to satisfy different data processing needs. Although it is possible to purchase the necessary hardware, deploy database products, establish network connectivity, and hire the professional people who run the system, as a traditional solution, this has been getting increasingly expensive and impractical as the database systems and problems become larger and more complicated.


Salesforce.com has come up with a new Database as Service model named as database.com. Apart from offering a highly scalable database as a service model the key offerings for the end customer are:

• Multitenant Architecture
• Secure and private database space on the cloud
• Pay as you Use Model
• Platform Independent : Integrates with every platform which supports SOAP/REST API calls
• Easy Data Migration from Legacy Database systems using Metadata API or Third Party Migration Tools like Informatica Cloud.

Database.com is part of the Force.com platform and provides developers with many features to develop applications for all of the major platforms and devices such as Google App Engine, Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, iPhones, iPad, Android devices, Blackberry and more. What's more, developers can build these applications using the language they are most comfortable be that Apex and Visualforce, Java, Spring, Ruby, Php, .Net and more.

Authentication

Force.com provides numerous was to connect depending on your specific requirements. Many cloud providers, including Salesforce.com, have implemented OAuth2 as a secure authorization API and way of removing the requirement to embed credentials into a particular application.

OAuth2 also assists developers to avoid the common scott/tiger approach of data authentication ---all users of your applications effectively connect to the database as a single user, therefore requiring application development effort to implement some level of security controls per application. Leveraging OAuth2, as an example allows the developer to delegate data security to the database where it belongs.

Below is the interview of Salesforce.con Product Manager, conducted by Don Fornes, CEO of Software Advice.

Salesforce CRM Licenses Available

1. Group Edition.
Group Edition, which is limited to five subscribers, is targeted primarily at small businesses and workgroups that seek a basic sales force automation solution without the sophisticated features required by larger companies. Users can use Group Edition to share important customer data and manage their customer relations—from the start of the sales cycle to closing the deal to providing basic customer service. Group Edition primarily offers access to accounts, contacts, opportunities, and reports. It does not include the more advanced customer service and support or marketing automation features such as: campaigns, forecasts, solutions, online case capture, self-service portal, notes and attachments, Offline Edition, and mass email capabilities. Using the Force.com platform, customers can further extend and customize Group Edition by adding additional custom tabs and/or a custom application.

2. Professional Edition.
Professional Edition is targeted primarily at medium-sized and large businesses that need a robust and complete CRM solution but do not need some of the more advanced administrative features and integration capabilities. Professional Edition offers companies a comprehensive CRM suite that business users can use to manage every aspect of the customer lifecycle. In addition to everything available in Group Edition, it provides users more advanced CRM functionality such as: forecasts, lead management, contract management, solutions, and online case capture. Professional Edition also comes with standard, easy-to-use customization, security and sharing, integration, and administration tools to facilitate any small to mid-sized deployment. Using the Force.com platform, Professional Edition customers have more flexibility than Group Edition customers to further extend and customize their service by adding more custom applications, custom tabs, and/or custom objects.

3. Enterprise Edition.
Enterprise Edition is designed to meet the complex business needs of large organizations with many divisions or departments. In addition to all of the functionality available in Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition offers customers:

• Advanced CRM functionality, such as territory management that uses a rule-based territory assignment engine to categorize accounts and users into territories, products, and schedules that track revenue and quantity by opportunities
• Multi-divisional sharing and permissions such as profile-based departmental security and sharing
• Workflow and business process control such as workflow automation tasks
• Enterprise customization and integration tools that can support large-scale deployments, such as APIs for back-office integration that enable companies to readily integrate Salesforce CRM with ERP applications and other data sources. With Enterprise Edition, customers also have greater flexibility and control to fully extend and customize our service by adding more custom applications, custom tabs, and/or custom objects.

4. Unlimited Edition.
Unlimited Edition is the fully featured edition, with exclusive features available only in Unlimited Edition and bundled add-on features included at a significant cost saving over the total price of the individual features. In addition to all of the functionality available in Enterprise Edition, Unlimited Edition includes unlimited installations from the AppExchange, increased customization and extension possibilities that customers can implement on their own, including Force.com Sandbox, which is described below, Salesforce CRM Mobile, Premier Support with Administration, and additional storage.

5. Partner relationship management, which is described above and marketed under the brand Salesforce CRM Partner Networks, provides channel managers with complete visibility into their company’s entire sales pipeline for direct and indirect channels.

The Salesforce CRM Service

Salesforce CRM provides a comprehensive array of SaaS CRM services, which enable customers and subscribers to systematically record, store, analyze, share and act upon business data, and to help businesses manage customer accounts, track sales leads, evaluate marketing campaigns, and provide post-sales service. It also enables companies to generate reports and summaries of this data and share them with authorized individuals across functional areas. Most of the features of our service can be accessed through a variety of devices, including laptop computers and mobile devices. Additionally, the service is highly configurable in a short amount of time, enabling the salesforce customers to tailor its appearance, policy settings, language, workflow, reports, and other characteristics without the use of significant IT resources or consultants. The salesforce services mainly focus on the following functional areas within CRM:

• Sales force automation
• Partner relationship management
• Customer service and support automation
• Marketing automation

Force.com platform (PAAS)

Force.com cloud computing platform, which was introduced in 2007, allows customers and partners to more extensively customize and integrate Salesforce CRM applications or build entirely new SaaS applications beyond CRM without having to invest in new software, hardware and related infrastructure. These newly developed applications, which are hosted and run on our infrastructure, can then be used for internal operations or sold to third parties.

Key Advantages of Force.com Flatform

1. Secure, scalable and reliable delivery platform : The delivery platform for force.com service has been designed to provide the customers with high levels of reliability, performance, and security. The most advanced and comprehensive security infrastructure, including firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and encryption for transmissions over the Internet are used for providing customer security.
2. Rapid deployment : The service can be deployed rapidly since our customers do not have to spend time procuring, installing or maintaining the servers, storage, networking equipment, security products, or other infrastructure hardware and software necessary to ensure a scalable and reliable service.
3. Lower Total cost of Ownership : There is a significant saving in costs upfront as compared to traditional software systems which have huge capital investment at the time of setting up the system. Ease of scalability and lower infrastructure requirements also help the organization to have lower Capex as most of Capex is actually converted into Opex.
4. Ease of integration and development : The platform is designed to enable IT professionals to integrate the new service with existing applications quickly and seamlessly. The Force.com platform provides a set of application programming interfaces, or APIs, that enable customers and independent developers to both integrate new service with existing third-party, custom, and legacy applications and write their own application services that integrate with new services

Platform-as-a-Services (PAAS)

People believe that SaaS applications and their related success in the market are only accepted segment of enterprise cloud computing. However, enterprise cloud computing actually includes building SaaS applications on an application development platform. This is called Platform-as-a-Service.

Application developers use PaaS technology to build both custom applications for individual businesses or vertical industries and horizontal applications to address standard business processes that can be sold to a broad range of potential customers. Application developers include corporate information technology (IT) departments that typically develop applications for a company’s internal use and independent software vendors (ISVs) that develop applications to sell to customers. Traditionally, these developers have needed to purchase, install, test and maintain complex software and hardware infrastructure to develop and deliver their applications. This requirement resulted in more time and resources spent maintaining infrastructure and less time and resources being available to develop applications, with a resulting impact on innovation and productivity levels.

PaaS enables corporate IT developers and ISVs to leverage the benefits of a multi-tenant platform for developing new applications. PaaS allows developers to build applications with a browser and an Internet connection, just as SaaS allows users to use applications through a browser.

Moving Beyond SAAS

A new twist, the platform in the cloud, is making the delivery of application functionality even more interesting. Increasingly, applications that run in the cloud are starting to look less like websites and more like platforms, meaning they are starting to sprout Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), code libraries, and even programming models. Collectively, these new kinds of development technologies can be thought of as platforms to run apps in the cloud.

Similar to traditional platforms, cloud computing platforms provide tools that allow developers to leverage existing functionality to create something new; however, because these platform tools are accessed freely over the Internet rather than through an operating system or package that was installed on a local machine, developers don't need to worry about the logistics of putting together an executable that will be installed on a user's machine. Anyone with a Web browser can access it!

The possibilities presented by this new type of platform have emerged quickly, spurred on by the popularity of mash-ups—a website or application that combines tools from multiple cloud computing platforms to create new functionality. Some of the cloud computing platform tools used in today's mash-ups include innovations like Google's search API, which allows developers to use the power of that search engine in their applications, eBay's APIs for auctions and listings, or Amazon.com's system for creating entirely new storefronts. For example, almost any real estate website or application these days uses Google or Yahoo! maps under the hood, illustrating how these new APIs are now commonly running alongside the more traditional database, app server, or operating system platforms.