If I were to explain to a lay-person, who is somewhat familiar to Salesforce, the difference between Salesforce.com and Salesforce1, without delving much into the technical aspects, what would be the best way to do so ?
This?
Did you try googling you're question?
[EDIT]
This post, and this article sum it up better than I can.
The main points, boiled down are:
1) Developers can develop in any platform and it will work with SF1. Previously, it took sort-of a specialized knowledge to develop in SF
2) There's a command line that can be used to perform functions or get data and is specifically usefully and less time consuming for SF specialists and devs
3) "Committing to open source" means that the SF1 product will incorporate the best of the tech community into their product, for free
4) Integration with another cloud database company/system, Heroku, allows a broader range of data access - not just through the SF application
5) All of the SF product features will be available in mobile in SF1.
IDK - that's my shot at simplifying the explanations I've read. I could be misstating a technical detail slightly (which I guess is fine based on what you need) and I'm sure there are better ways of reducing the topic to more common language.
Hope this helps.
Both Salesforce.com and Salesforce1 can be accessed via a web client running on a PC, tablet, or phone.
Salesforce1 is optimized to work on a small touchscreen and can have functions via 3rd party apps to access iOS or Android features like GPS location data.
Related
We've narrowed our selection for an ipaas down to the above 3.
Initially we're looking to pass data from a cloud based HR system to Netsuite, and from Netsuite to Salesforce, and sometimes JIRA.
i've come from a Mulesoft background which I think would be too complex for this. On the other hand it seems that Celigo is VERY drag and drop, and there's not much room for modification/customisation.
Of the three, do you have any experience/recommendations? We aren't looking for any code heavy custom APIs, most will just be simple scheduled data transfers but there may be some complexity within the field mapping, and we want to set ourselves up for the future.
I spent a few years removing Celigo from NetSuite and Salesforce. The best way I can describe Celigo is that it is like the old school anti-virus programs which were often worse than the viruses... lol... It digs itself into the end system, making removing it a nightmare.
Boomi does the job, but is very counter-intuitive, and overly complex. You can't do everything from one screen, you can't easily bounce back and forth between tasks/operations/etc. And, sometimes it is very difficult to find where endpoints are used, as they are not always shown in their "where is this used" feature. Boomi has a ton of endpoint connectors pre-built (the most, I believe), but I have not seen an easy way to just create your own. Boomi also has much more functionality than just the integrations, if that is something that may be needed.
Jitterbit, my favorite, is ridiculously simple to use. You can access everything from one main screen, you can connect to anything (as long as it can reach out to the network, or you can reach it via the network - internal or external). Jitterbit has a lot of pre-built endpoint connectors. It is also extremely easy to just create a connection to anything you want. The win with Jitterbit is that it is super easy to use, super easy to learn, it always works, they have amazing support (if you need it). I have worked with Jitterbit the most (about 6 years), and I have never been unable to complete an integration task in less that a couple of day, max.
I have extensive experience with Dell Boomi platform but none with JitterBit or Celigo. Dell Boomi offers very versatile and well supported iPaaS solution. The technical challenges of Boomi are some UI\usability issues (#W3BGUY mentioned the main ones) and the lack of out-of-the-box support for CI/CD and DevOps processes (code management, versioning, deployments etc.)
One more important component to consider here is the pricing of the platform. Boomi does charge their clients yearly connection prices. Connection is defined as a unique combination of URL, username and password. The yearly license costs vary and can range anywhere between ($1,000 - $12,000) per license per year. The price depends greatly on your integration landscape and the discounts provided so I would advise on engaging with vendor early to understand your costs. Would be great to hear from others on pricing for JitterBit and Celigo.
Boomi is also more than just an iPaaS platform. They offer other modules of their platform to customers: API Management, Boomi Flow (workflow and automation module), Master Data Hub (master data management). Some of these modules are well developed and some are in their infancy (API Management).
From my limited experience with MuleSoft platform, I share the OP's sentiments about it being too complex for simple integrations. They do provide great CI/CD and DevOps functionality though if that is something that is needed.
There is not a simple answer to a question like this. One needs to look at multiple aspects of the platform and make a decision based on multitude of factors. I would advise looking at Gartner and Forrester reports for a general guidelines and working out the pricing (initial and recurring) with the vendor.
I have only used Jitterbit, so can only comment on that. It works fine. It is pretty intuitive and easy to use, but does have some flexibility with writing your own queries, defining and mapping file formats, and choosing different transfer protocols.
I've only used the free version (which you need to host somewhere and also is not supported) and it was good enough for production tasks. If you have the luxury of time, I'd say download it and try it out. If it works for you, throw it on a server or upgrade to the cloud version.
One note: Jitterbit uses background services. If you run it locally and then decide to migrate your account to a server, you need to stop those services on your local. Otherwise, it will try to run jobs from both locations and that doesn't turn out well.
Consider checking out Choreo as well. It has a novel simultaneous code + low-code approach for integration development. And provides rich AI support for performance monitoring, debugging, and data mapping.
Disclaimer: I'm a member of the project.
firstly I apologise if this is a ridiculously simple question to answer but it has been bothering me for a while.
I am trying to understand what salesforce actually is, I mean in technical terms. I have read the websites documentation and the wikipedia page but I am trying to understand what's behind all this fluffy terminology.
My understanding is that salesforce is a cloud based database which stores a very high volume of information and all salesforce apps consists of scripts that query this database and model them in different ways depending on the intended application, is this correct?
Thanks !
Software as a Service (SaaS)
To get program you need to download it, install, configure and so on. If your system have a lot of users it's very hard to configure ans support single user installation.
Imagine that you improved application, new release for example. You need update every instance.
With SaaS model you have a shared web application, that do the same thing as old downloadable one. But it's much easier to support it, because ideally there is just one instance of it.
Salesforce is a company that provides its own system by SaaS model, but not only. It is also a platform for developing new applications.
I'm going to create a fairly large (from my point of view anyway) web project with a friend. We will create a site with roads and other road related info.
Our calculations is that we will have around 100k items in our database. Each item will contain some information like location, name etc. (about 30 thing each). We are counting on having a few hundred thousand unique visitors per month.
The 100k items and their locations (that will be searchable) will be the main part of the page but we will also have some articles, comments, news and later on some more social functions (accounts, forums, picture uploads etc.).
We were going to use Google AppEngine to develop our project since it is really scalable and free (at least for a while). But I'm actually starting to doubt that AppEngine is right for us. It seems to be for webbapps and not sites like ours.
Which system (language/framework etc.) would you guys recommend us to use? It doesn't really mater if we know the language since before (we like learning new stuff) but it would be good if it's something that is future proof.
I think that GAE can do the job. Google claims that Google App Engine is able to handle 5 million visitors for free and you will have to start paying only if you exceed their free quota.
It's also pretty easy to get started. If you don't have experience on administrating websites and choose a regular hosting service, you will have to worry about several things that you don't even imagine now.
My only concern would be with respect of the kind of data and queries you will have to do, since it does not have a relational database. Anyway, there is an open source project for GAE, called GeoModel that gives GAE the ability to do complex geo spacial queries, like proximity fetch. Have a look at their tutorial and the demo app.
About your impression that GAE was intended only for small web apps, there are a couple of CMS that run on it.
Good luck!
If once of your concerns is scalability, and you don't want to depend on expensive or commercial tools, I would recommend that you take a look at this tech stack:
Erlang - A programming language designed for concurrency and distribution.
Nitrogen - An Erlang web framework with a lot of cool stuff, like transparent AJAX.
NoSQL scalable databases, such as CouchDB or Riak - Save the the hassle of SQL code and are more scalable than plain MySQL. Both has direct native Erlang API.
To be honest, I don't know if this tool set is your cup of tea; These are not mainstream solutions. I just suggest these to everyone who ask about size-sensitive web applications.
All serious web frameworks will provide you with what you need. The real issues (for example scalability) might be tackled in a different way depending on what you use, but you wont be limited if you choose a well-known one. The choice of database system might be more important for that (sql vs nosql), even if both of those will do fine too.
It's all about
knowing how to use
enjoying to use
the tool(s) you've chosen.
In either case, name-dropping some suggestions:
Rails (Ruby)
Django (Python)
Nitrogen (Erlang)
ASP.NET MVC (C#)
And please note, if you really want to learn everything from the bottom, you'd be fine with any of these (or one of the other gazillion out there). But if you want to perform your best, choose one that supports a language you know well or uses techniques/tools you have experience of etc. Think twice about how you value this is fun and we learn a lot against we want to be productive and do a really good job.
Lately I've been looking at force.com which happens to be SalesForce.com's cloud initiative. However, what I am unable to draw is its comparison with Amazon & Azure platforms. Force.com seems to be targeting Enterprises primarily, so I am not sure if as a small shop, I should be going that way. Mine is going to be a social networking portal. What attracted me to force.com is the 'chatter' platform. I am struggling to find information w.r.t. pricing of using this platform. Most of the pricing details are written in the format $xyz/user/month. Now that may go well for an enterprise but not for someone like me who is going for a social networking with unpredictable number of user. I get a feeling that I am missing something somewhere. Further, I don't see many review about the platform. Can someone throw some light on that as well?
Force.com is absolutely a PaaS offering making SFDC more than a CRM SaaS player. That being said I do not see them offering Chatter as a stand-alone application anytime soon, if ever. Force.com does have it's own pricing model. This is all readily available on their web site.
As always, it depends on what you want to achieve. Force.com is ideal for forms based, data-centric application development - check out Jason Ouelette's book on Force.com if you're interested in learning ideal app dev situations for Force.com. I suspect even the most aggressive Force.com supporters would not think of Force.com as being ideal for your purposes. Zoho and Caspio offer data driven PaaS as well, but again I do not think this is ideal for your application.
If I were in your position I would try to leverage a platform already developed for social networking purposes like Ning or even something like Google Groups. Can you achieve 90%+ of the end user functionality you're looking for with free services readily available?
This article is old but perhaps some of these examples other than Ning might help: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/24/9-ways-to-build-your-own-social-network/
The Force.com developer challenges have shown you can build just about anything on Force.com, but just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
To the other respondents - if you're not taking PaaS, in general, and Force.com, specifically, seriously as Custom App Dev platforms then you're behind the curve. Force.com is a great platform but I do not think it is well suited for your particular needs.
Force.com fails to deliver on one of the key cloud promises: scalability. It is a very resource-constrained environment, and developing even CRM products on it can be a trial if your customer's model of their business is not in line with Salesforce's. It is definitely not the right solution for a casual social-networking platform. You will be signing up to have your hands tied for very little gain.
A couple of links for you:
force.com evening the score and force.com VS net
Give a bit of a developers view on the force.com platform. You absolutely don't want to use the chatter application as it is available to an "org" but each user will need a license on your org to gain access to chatter.
There is a free edition which allows 100 users, so you could theoretically create a network of 100 users, but after that you'd have to start paying.
SFDC is also a platform, and the capabilities of the Java-like language (APEX) have grown significantly over time.
As for pricing, there are a lot of different options. There are light users and standard users, as well as pricing based on bandwidth. You can also negotiate with Salesforce over the pricing, but AFAIK there are not people building mass market applications based off of Force.com, largely because of these issues.
Screen scraping seems like a useful tool - you can go onto someone else's site and steal their data - how wonderful!
But I'm having a hard time with how useful this could be.
Most application data is pretty specific to that application even on the web. For example, let's say I scrape all of the questions and answers off of StackOverflow or all of the results off of Google (assuming this were possible) - I'm left with data that is not very useful unless I either have a competing question and answer site (in which case the stolen data will be immediately obvious) or a competing search engine (in which case, unless I have an algorithm of my own, my data is going to be stale pretty quickly).
So my question is, under what circumstances could the data from one app be useful to some external app? I'm looking for a practical example to illustrate the point.
It's useful when a site publicly provides data that is (still) not available as an XML service. I had a client who used scraping to pull flight tracking data into one of his company's intranet applications.
The technique is also used for research. I had a client who wanted to compare the contents of several online dictionaries by part of speech, and all of these sites had to be scraped.
It is not a technique for "stealing" data. All ordinary usage restrictions apply. Many sites implement CAPTCHA mechanisms to prevent scraping, and it is inappropriate to work around these.
A good example is StackOverflow - no need to scrape data as they've released it under a CC license. Already the community is crunching statistics and creating interesting graphs.
There's a whole bunch of popular mashup examples on ProgrammableWeb. You can even meet up with fellow mashupers (O_o) at events like BarCamps and Hack Days (take a sleeping bag). Have a look at the wealth of information available from Yahoo APIs (particularly Pipes) and see what developers are doing with it.
Don't steal and republish, build something even better with the data - new ways of understanding, searching or exploring it. Always cite your data sources and thank those who helped you. Use it to learn a new language or understand data or help promote the semantic web. Remember it's for fun not profit!
Hope that helps :)
If the site has data that would benefit from being accessible through an API (and it would be free and legal to do so), but they just haven't implemented one yet, screen scraping is a way of essentially creating that functionality for yourself.
Practical example -- screen scraping would allow you to create some sort of mashup that combines information from the entire SO family of sites, since there's currently no API.
Well, to collect data from a mainframe. That's one reason why some people use screen scraping. Mainframes are still in use in the financial world and often it's running software that has been written in the previous century. The people who wrote it might already be retired and since this software is very critical for these organizations, they really hate it when some new code needs to be added. So, screenscraping offers an easy interface to communicate with the mainframe to collect information from the mainframe and then send it onwards to any process that needs this information.
Rewrite the mainframe application, you say? Well, software on mainframes can be very old. I've seen software on mainframes that was over 30 years old, written in COBOL. Often, those applications work just fine and companies don't want to risk rewriting parts because it might break some code that had been working for over 30 years! Don't fix things if they're not broken, please. Of course, additional code could be written but it takes a long time for mainframe code to be used in a production environment. And experienced mainframe developers are hard to find.
I myself had to use screen scraping too in a software project. This was a scheduling application which had to capture the output to the console of every child process it started. It's the simplest form of screen scraping, actually, and many people don't even realize that if you redirect the output of one application to the input of another, that it's still a kind of screen scraping. :)
Basically, screen scraping allows you to connect one (web) application with another one. It's often a quick solution, used when other solutions would cost too much time. Everyone hates it, but the amount of time it saves still makes it very efficient.
Let's say you wanted to get scores from a popular sports site that did not offer the information available with an XML feed or API.
For one project we found a (cheap) commercial vendor that offered translation services for a specific file format. The vendor didn't offer an API (it was, after all, a cheap vendor) and instead had a web form to upload and download from.
With hundreds of files a day the only way to do this was to use WWW::Mechanize in Perl, screen scrape the way through the login and upload boxes, submit the file, and save the returned file. It's ugly and definitely fragile (if the vendor changes the site in the least it could break the app) but it works. It's been working now for over a year.
One example from my experience.
I needed a list of major cities throughout the world with their latitude and longitude for an iPhone app I was building. The app would use that data along with the geolocation feature on the iPhone to show which major city each user of the app was closest to (so as not to show exact location), and plot them on a 3D globe of the earth.
I couldn't find an appropriate list in XML/Excel/CSV type format anywhere easily, but I did find this wikipedia page with (roughly) the info I needed. So I wrote up a quick script to scrape that page and load the data into a database.
Any time you need a computer to read the data on a website. Screen scraping is useful in exactly the same instances that any website API is useful. Some websites, however, don't have the resources to create an API themselves; screen scraping is the developer's way around that.
For instance, in the earlier days of Stack Overflow, someone built a tool to track changes to your reputation over time, before Stack Overflow itself provided that feature. The only way to do that, since Stack Overflow has no API, was to screen scrape.
The obvious case is when a webservice doesn't offer reverse search. You can implement that reverse search over the same data set, but it requires scraping the entire dataset.
This may be fair use if the reverse search also requires significant pre-processing, e.g. because you need to support partial matching. The data source may not have the technical skills or computing resources to provide the reverse search option.
I use screen scraping daily, I run some eCommerce sites and have screen-scraping scripts running daily to gather product lists automatically from my suppliers wholesale sites. This allows me to have upto date information on all the products available to me from several suppliers and allows me to flag non-economical margins due to price changes.