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We have a customer who makes use of Salesforce, but they want to develop their own site which will perform a multitude of functions some of which would require integration with Salesforce data and functionality.
In discussions with a Salesforce vendor and our customer, the Salesforce vendor pushed for the customer to do everything in Salesforce itself, as in a portal solution where their entire website is run through Salesforce, or you would switch from some basic HTML pages on your own server to Salesforce pages (Skinned to look like the customer's site).
Surely this recommendation is not in the best interests of the customer?
Doesn't this restrict and limit you to Salesforce technologies and costs?
Long term, if this company decided in the future to expand and build web based functionality that is totally separate from Salesforce what would happen?
Let me know what you think and possibly give me a link or two to motivate what you're saying.
I'm hoping that system/application architects will be the ones to answer, not Salesforce vendors.
Thanks,
Jacques
They may well have been talking about Salesforce Sites. Which do allow you to build a lot of custom functionality, and leverage the power of the Salesforce platform. That said, it does lock you in somewhat. It will likely also limit just what you can do. It really depends just what functionality from Salesforce they want to expose to their customers through the site. It may be a case that a salesforce customer portal (skinned to fit the corporate look and feel) would suffice, and they can leave their existing site alone.
The other option is to build all the functionality on their own site using the SOAP or REST based APIs which Salesforce offer. This has it's pros and cons too. It offers you more flexibility with what you want to do with your site, and you can always switch hosting provider for the site too relatively easily. You could even switch from a PHP to ASP site and still have the same functionality. All of this takes time to develop. It can be used as a way around the expensive salesforce licenses though, and Salesforce just becomes a fancy database for your site in some regards.
Without knowing just how much of the data/functionality within Salesforce the customer wants on their site, And what ultimately they want to get from their website, it is difficult to give a clear answer though.
Also you can check out http://www.magentrix.com, they provide a very flexible and customizable portal for Salesforce.
It's also a cloud-based application, so you are always running the latest version and get tons of new features and tools in each release.
Also the service is offered with a tiered pricing model rather than per user license which makes it more affordable.
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We are looking to upgrade our current product. The current product is built using web forms (asp.net), c# and Sql server. The current product does not follow much of the best practices such as IOC, Unit of work, Repository pattern etc, however it does follow three layered architecture.
We would like to build the new product from scratch using best practices so that product can be scaled up when required. Our product needs to be a multi tennant web application which should be mobile friendly if viewed on a mobile device. We have found aspnet zero boiler plate which follows best practices but it seems a wee bit limited for us. The disappointment for us is the effort it requires to just add one new field as we would need to add it into multiple places and then recompile the product and publish it. Our product also rely on multiple forms and each form can contain hundereds of fields and on top of that each of our customers may not use all fields in the same form so we need a mechanism to hide and display fields based on customer's credentials. The dynamic creation of forms is a must requirement for us. I have listed below the requirements that we need:
Must follow Industry standard best practices (IOC, Unit of work, Repository, logging etc)
Ability to create forms dynamically and to report on these fields.
Should not rely on compiling and publishing the product for adding additonal field.
Custom business rules for each customer
Adhoc web based reporting
Full auditing to record changed and new value for certain or all fields.
Fully scalable
Role/User based permissions
Is there a suitable framework for achieving above or do we need to build it ourselves?
You used the tag "aspnetboilerplate" So why don't use them ?
I have been learning it since 2016 and it really helpful. A lot of things is well documented and its open source and free. Give it a try.
All the features you specified are included in AspNet Zero application framework. You can start a free demo to see the user interface. Check out the documentation. If you like it you can buy. There's 30 day money guarantee back.
https://aspnetzero.com/
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I'd like to build an open source online learning platform on top of app engine, but there are a couple of challenges that make me doubt if it's even a good idea.
The reason I'd like to do it on app engine, is because it takes care of the hosting. Most open source learning platforms today require a LAMP stack, so someone in the school has to know how to upload the software via ftp, look up database login details, select a hosting provoder,...
The only problems on app engine I'm struggling with are
The process of setting up an app id is geared towards developers.
schools would still need to download the app engine sdk
Billing is done on raw resource usage, which is hard to translate into software feature usage.
For 1, it's easy enough to write up a guide, but if you have any ideas on how to make it easier, let me know.
Problem 2: The sdk, or if possible, only appcfg.py, could be included into some 'installer', which asks for your app id, and would set it up for you. This would also allow me to initialize the datastore.
But I'm really stuck on 3. It would be possible to estimate how much usage of a certain feature will cost, track the total usage of a feature and estimate the bill for the school that way, showing a breakdown of which features are costing them the most, but I don't know a good way to do this.
App Engine is for developers, period, end of discussion. Instead of giving each school it's own app id, as in myschool.appspot.com, what if instead you set up one central project at, say, myschoolthing.appspot.com, and that school would be at myschoolthing.appspot.com/school/myschool. You pay resource based fees to appengine, and schools pay you fees at whatever level you want. So if you want them to be billed by number of students, go ahead. Hours of use? Go ahead. Etc., etc., etc.
You can create an easy to use school sign up page, to replace confusing ad technical deployments.
This method does require you to pay app engine and set up a way to accept payments, but it is much closer to what you want.
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I'm trying to work out what hosting to get for a small pop up site to take registrations from an EDM campaign. We will send the emails out from mailchimp or similar, and then the site will need to show a couple of info pages and a registration form. Ill proccess the form with cakephp to save to the db and email the registrant.
The email will go out to around 10,000 recipients - so i guess worse case scenario is they all open it at once and click to go to the site, if unlikely.
Is VPS required for this, or will cloud hosting do it? How do people go about estimating that?
Is VPS required for this, or will cloud hosting do it?
In general cloud hosting means a VPS, and then some. Usually the difference is that cloud providers often provide other services (like maybe a CDN, robust APIs, etc) and provide on-demand usage-based billing. This sounds perfect for you since you can just spin up additional instances (if you have a proxy/load balancer) or resize your instances if you find yourself running out of CPU or RAM.
However, cloud services can be a bit ambiguous at times, so let me break it down further. If you are considering a VPS you probably want to go with a provider that gives you a "cloud" VPN where with on-demand (hourly) billing so you can add/resize your VPNs as needed. My current favorite is Rackspace Cloud Servers, but others (like Amazon EC2) are good too. The main reason I prefer Rackspace is that the instances aren't transient (all data is gone on reboot) like Amazon's, which can complicate system architecture.
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I'm going to deploy my application on one of them,
and have no idea which is better.
Amazon's Cloud services, at this time, are much more general and flexible, while Google App Engine essentially fits some specific classes of applications that can live within its specific limitations (those limitations are being gradually relaxed, as GAE adds features and allows you to pay to exceed certain quotas, but that does not mean GAE will become a completely general-purpose platform the way Amazon's services are).
If your app can live within GAE's limitations, then GAE presents advantages: free up to a certain quota, almost no system configuration / administration overhead, etc. But if you need total flexibility -- for example, if you want to code part of your apps in C or C++, and that's just one of many examples -- then GAE is not suitable, while Amazon (for a price, in both money and sysadm overhead) can accomodate you.
If you've already written your app, and just want to deploy it, I'd have to say AWS is your best bet. AWS is a platform (or rather, EC2 is), and deploying an existing app is easy. App Engine, on the other hand, provides an entire development environment, at a much higher level of abstraction, which has significant advantages when it comes to scaling, but requires you to have written your app to work on it.
Now how about Free Amazon EC2 for a year to do a better comparision. Check this out.
http://www.buzzingup.com/2010/10/amazon-announces-free-cloud-services-for-new-developers/
No one is king in this field because both amazon and google have their own pros and cons. for the finally decision you have to study deep about both or you have to analyze what you required for you apps.
no doubt aws is old in this field and they have lot of good quality stuff but remember google is fast growing in cloud computing.
personally aws is easy to use and training and support is easily available on the other side google is his early stage and bit complex interface for newbie
so you can learn from you requirement
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I'm evaluating DotNetNuke for a project in which an offshore team is going to be doing the development. In short, the application will be a community blogging platform with many similarities to stackoverflow except no questions, just posts. Posts may include an image or video, tags, use info, title, body, community vote (up or down) comments, hotness, and a few other details. They should be taggable, sortable, categorizeable (beyond what a single set of tags provide) In the future the site will carry forums, a calendar, and a couple of other features for which there are modules available for DotNetNuke. Additionally, this site will incorporate a user experience that will include a lot of custom skinning.
Thoughts?
Using a web application framework (such as DotNetNuke) has a ton of benefits to help you get up and running faster and do less work when creating custom functionality.
However, you have to realize that you're basically incorporating tons of code into your project that you may not be familiar with. No matter how good the code is and how easy the framework is to learn, there's still going to be a significant learning curve for you and your team.
Your decision making process (if you're still deciding whether or not to use DotNetNuke), should include (in addition to reading, talking and other general investigation):
Downloading the application from Codeplex and checking out the source.
Investigating the third party modules that are out there.
Downloading a free module or two that comes with source, and try to reverse engineer the creator's development process. How did she integrate with the framework, what features did she take advantage of, what was written from scratch?
One place where DotNetNuke (or any other framework with tons of extensions) available can really shine is taking existing extensions that are available and customize them. If you need to implement a given feature, check out the solutions in the third party extension community first. You can probably find one that gets you a good percentage of the way there and use it as a foundation for your feature.
For example, if you want a photo gallery on your site, you probably don't want to write it from scratch. There are three major photo galleries out there that sell the source code. The core gallery module is free, simple gallery is cheap, and the source for ultra media gallery is available for a reasonable amount compared to writing it yourself. Any of these could give you a good head start in implementing your features.