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.