Tech Briefing focused on Salesforce at GSB link no longer available
1100-1200
SalesForce.Com non-CRM uses
Corey Landers – School of H&S
Problem statement: H&S wants to standardize on one platform. They are considering Salesforce for easy automation to do quick web development.
Who uses Salesforce: GSB, SOM, Alumni, ITS, Ticketing, others?
UIT – Using CRM only, out of the box use only
GSB – Building non-standard CRM uses
Hoping to build simple, quick applications on top of Salesforce platform to eliminate paper processes and small databases.
Question:
Any consideration for Google Forms or similar (Mendix) Platform for building applications?
GSB will add presentation on applications on Salesforce apps to meeting notes.
GSB Built Admissions Application and many other applications/processes.
(Has 4 developers with Java/.Net experience converted to Salesforce)
What is the requirement – do end-users build forms/applications? Unknown
Question:
What is the Salesforce experience? Salesforce has some inherent limitations, is it worth in the trade-offs?
Answers:
- Salesforce has purchased Heroku that has a more traditional (complex) software deployment model that takes advantage of Salesforce framework
- Salesforce has governor limit – dependent on licensing – for example 100,000 API calls – if you are not disciplined – you will hit the limit
- Like any cloud provider – responsibility for monitoring usage is on the user
- Salesforce is good for simplified development – (add fields for example)
- Custom application development different and there will be a limit. Heroku more of a development platform for high end custom development
- If you are going to do custom apps – why pay for salesforce – Stanford already pays for Oracle – just custom develop using Oracle
Use Salesforce to use CRM and similar functionality and light programming
Hope with Salesforce is going to be time savings – less programming platform, more configuration
Advantage of salesforce is using CRM like applications – custom development is not advised. GSB using salesforce in a non-traditional way.
Custom development is hard to support in any platform – especially true in Salesforce
Endowment & Fund Management group comments:
Evaluation of Tamale Salsesforce and other CRMs done three years ago – cloud based was a non-starter at the time. Custom development consultancy teams/ service not available for Salesforce – instead went to Pivotal. Downside is consultancy company hired to do custom development. Other endowment groups at similar institutions going to Salesforce.
UIT Comments:
- Salesforce is open standards so integrations are easier. For example Avaya/Salesforce integration being piloted by UIT.
- Also compatible with single sign on
- Limit – documentation stored in data is cost prohibitive. No storage.
Question:
If you were to pick a different platform – for easy development what would it be:
Answers:
- Google Forms – easy, but storage and privacy information is restricted
- Oracle Apex – already linked to database and maintained by Stanford
Comment:
There are now non-compiled options and templates now Jango, Ruby, Python options that you don’t have to go through Java now.
Response:
At the end of the it will likely be Java and you are going to need developers
Comment:
Platforms looking for database, security, workflows already there. Do not want to spend development time on these issues.
Comment:
Salesforce data model is not relational – it is object/hierarchical based. Therefore complex joins are problematic.
Question:
What has the end-user response been in GSB for course selection tool for instance?
Answer:
Users don’t know they have another choice. They are fine for using the portal for multiple applications (registration, trip applications, others)
Schools can go from concept to launch quickly.
GSB is pulling mostly PeopleSoft and PostGrads data into Salesforce. This is mostly student data with no prohibited data. They are using transactSQL to upload data.
Proposed By
Cory Landers
Notes
Year
2014
