Many people have heard of Salesforce.  Right now, you’re probably thinking of a web portal used by sales people to find new customers, maintain accounts, and track opportunities, and you’d be right to think that.   Salesforce is a great platform for CRM, but it’s so much more than that.

There are plenty of articles out there on the web tracking the meteoric growth of Salesforce as a company.  One reason for this, is that Salesforce is becoming a full-blown platform, allowing developers (or even savvy business users) to create workflows, business processes, and more using an entire ecosystem of tooling.

Salesforce is a multi-tenant application, meaning multiple organizations will share the same instance. Think of this as renting office space in a downtown sky rise instead of building your own office in the suburbs. When you rent the space, the landlord (Salesforce) is taking care of everything for you in terms of water, electricity, security, mail delivery, and likely offers several on-site services such as a dry cleaning. In a similar fashion, Salesforce is providing you with hosting, application monitoring, security, API extensibility, and much more by building your application inside their environment. It’s less for you to worry about as a developer.

Let’s use a contrived example that I want to manage my video game collection on Salesforce, which is about as far from “sales” as one could get.   Inside the web portal, I create my objects (Games, Publishers, Platforms) specifying the field types, validation rules, any parent-child relationships.  Once my data types are setup, I can enter records right away using the Salesforce UI.  Additionally, my data is available via a REST or SOAP API automatically.  It’s also available for me in the Salesforce mobile app.  I didn’t need to do any programming to setup the basic CRUD behaviors for these new objects, everything exists there for me.   Sure, I can extend the application (more on that later), but a lot of the tedious boilerplate work is already taken care of for me.

If I want to write applications that work with this data I created, I can do so using a programming language known as Apex, which is syntactically very similar to C#.  I can write database queries inside this programming language to query my data using SOQL (Salesforce Object Query Language) which is very similar in syntax to SQL.  If I want to insert/update/delete data in Salesforce I can use DML (Data Manipulation Language).  I can also search this data using SOSL (Salesforce Object Search Language) which has a similar syntax to Lucene for anyone who is familiar with the popular search framework that powers Elasticsearch/Solr.  Development is either done inside the ‘Developer Console‘ in Salesforce or can be done with an extension for VS Code.

As if the full development environment were not enough to convince you, there is also a full-featured learning portal, Trailhead, which gamifies the learning process, allowing you to earn badges and points for completing tutorials and even allows you to complete hands-on exercise and checks those exercises for you.  There are exercises for every type of user (business user, admin, or developer) with varying degrees of difficulty that allow to get a quick start on the basics, but also continue to learn and grow to become an advanced user.  Once you’re comfortable developing on the platform, Salesforce even offers several certifications to show to prospective clients that you are indeed qualified and capable.

There are a large number of courses available to developers on both Pluralsight and Udemy (and others I’m sure) for anyone who is looking to learn more about Salesforce development.  Salesforce has a large community following of very passionate customers as well.  If you were to look at any job board, you would see Salesforce skills are in high-demand, and growing rapidly along with the company itself.  They also host a number of conferences they host each year, including Dreamforce in San Francisco.

I really hope this post gave you a good high-level overview of what Salesforce offers.   In the future, I plan to dive into more specifics of the Salesforce platform as I continue to learn all it has to offer.   Two key areas I’m really interested in learning more about are Einstein Analytics, Salesforce’s AI/BI intelligence platform, and Integration Cloud (formerly Mulesoft), an integration platform that connects multiple systems with an intelligent API.   I should also probably include Commerce Cloud (formerly Demandware) as well given my history as an Ecommerce developer.