Chapter 1: A Brief Introduction to Salesforce
We will start our journey through the Salesforce platform customization with a quick overview of the history of the company, by highlighting the key milestones across its 20+ years of life.
Then, we'll briefly see what's inside the platform and how it works, describing the multitenant architecture that lets multiple Salesforce customers be located on the same physical servers without harming one another this is the core of how Salesforce works and the reason of its successfully scalable and reliable architecture.
As this is a learning book, we'll also have a look at Trailhead, the fantastic learning platform that's rapidly becoming a founding brick of Salesforce knowledge-sharing philosophy. At the end of almost each chapter you'll see a Blaze your trail section that will contain Trailheads content related to the specific chapter's topic.
To test our new skills, we'll also see how to create a free environment (called a Salesforce Developer Edition org, or simply a DE org) activated with all the main platform features so that you can learn along with reading this book.
In this chapter, we'll focus on the following topics:
- Salesforce company history
- How the Salesforce platform is built
- How to have fun learning Salesforce with Trailhead
- How to create a Developer Edition org to learn with examples
Understanding Salesforce
Defining Salesforce as a Software as a Service (SaaS) Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is reductive nowadays. A CRM is a software meant to help and manage customer relationships (mostly sales and service processes) while integrating with legacy systems (where most of the data comes from, such as shipping tracking details or product logistic details, to name just a few), while SaaS means that the software is in the cloud and you have access to it without the need to take care of all the hardware and infrastructure you would need for other competitors' products.
Further reading
Read the post at https://crm.org/crmland/what-is-a-crm for a deeper explanation of what a CRM is; it will take you some time to understand how companies benefit from a well-structured and reliable CRM system.
Today, Salesforce is much more than a CRM, after successful and smart acquisitions, making the Salesforce ecosystem one of the most important cloud companies out there, bringing marketing automation features, custom application development with any language, e-commerce solutions, powerful analytics solutions, and, recently, a lot of artificial intelligence.
For the sake of this book, we'll cover the center of this ecosystem, and the oldest and richest of features, the Salesforce CRM platform, which will let you customize an environment to do practically anything you want, which might go beyond simple customer management.
Why is Salesforce so special? You decided to purchase a book about Salesforce customization, so you must have come into contact with the technology in some way.
The technological aspect is surely one of the most important aspects: the CRM platform is the center of the whole product ecosystem and it can be used to centralize all data (this is the so-called Customer 360 platform), and we can say that Salesforce is one of the first companies that centered its business in the cloud.
But in my opinion, what differentiates Salesforce from other companies and competitors is its genuine will to make people, whether they are customers, consultants, employees, or partners (let's generically call everyone stakeholders), feel part of an amazing community where profit is only one of the driving factors.
We'll talk about the Salesforce community and the Ohana value in Chapter 19, Salesforce Ohana – The Most Amazing Community Around.
Let's highlight the most important milestones in Salesforce's history, so we can have a better view of how huge Salesforce has become in these 20 years of its history.
Unfolding the evolution of Salesforce
Salesforce's growth in the last 20 years has been incredible: by 2024, it is expected that the net revenue of Salesforce's industry will exceed $1 trillion (that is, $1,000,000,000,000).
Further reading
Have a read at the The Salesforce Economic Impact white paper by IDC, available at https://www.salesforce.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/documents/reports/idc-salesforce-economy-report.pdf, for a complete analysis of the Salesforce industry economic impact worldwide.
Everything started in March 1999, just like in the old fashioned Silicon Valley start-up fables: four buddies started a company at Telegraph Hill, San Francisco, in a one-bedroom apartment (have a look at the actual pictures at https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2019/02/salesforce-san-francisco-1999.html).
It was Marc Benioff's house (founder and current CEO at Salesforce), along with Parker Harris, Frank Dominguez, and Dave Moellenhoff.
Their aim was to create business applications with the SaaS model, designing adaptable applications without high maintenance and development costs, following the same paradigm of Amazon.com: an easy-to-use site but for business applications. They developed the basis of the first SaaS CRM in just 1 month!
It was in 2000 that the Salesforce.com company moved to 1 Market Street (San Francisco) and launched the product, along with the famous and controversial No Software brand, which soon become synonymous with Salesforce. Of course, this does not mean that a SaaS application doesn't require any lines of code, but rather that your company will rely on cloud software only, and so no legacy software is needed anymore (but, as you can imagine, No Software alone is quite catchy!).
The Salesforce CRM software continued to evolve, and its features were presented in so-called City Tours, a few hour-long events handled in diverse US cities. But it was in 2003 that Salesforce launched one of its most iconic events, Dreamforce, a few-day event held in San Francisco where all Salesforce customers could meet each other and learn what was going on with their CRM software (there were around 1,000 participants).
In 2004, Salesforce.com Inc. went public on the NYSE with the CRM stock code (although I consider myself totally illiterate in financial education, I love that stock symbol choice!).
In 2006, the AppExchange portal was launched: the apps economy was just starting, and Salesforce partners could build reusable artifacts (or packages) that other packages could use to enhance their Salesforce customizations, reducing implementation and maintenance efforts. Apple's App Store was launched later on, and, as you read at https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2019/02/steve-jobs-inspired-appexchange.html, the appstore.com domain and trademark was gifted by Marc Benioff to Steve Jobs as an act of gratitude for having inspired such a successful business model.
At the 2006 Dreamforce event, the Apex on-demand programming language was presented, and that changed the way the Salesforce CRM could be customized; a lot of lines of code could run on Salesforce infrastructure to enhance automation customizations. In the same event, the Visualforce framework was also presented, granting Salesforce partners the ability to build complex user interfaces.
In 2008, the Force.com platform was delivered, which, thanks to Apex and Visualforce, let customers implement their own customized applications side by side with the usual standard CRM processes: this was the advent of the Platform as a Service (PaaS) model.
I joined the Salesforce Ohana (refer to Chapter 19, Salesforce Ohana – The Most Amazing Community Around, for more details on the Ohana movement) in early 2009, as a Salesforce junior developer at WebResults (an engineering group). It was a risky bet for our former CEO, Lorenzo Coslovi, and our CTO, Alessandro Plebani, who, a few years earlier, decided to start investing in the Salesforce world, when Salesforce was not really known in the Italian market and its market share was really small. They created a fantastic team of professionals, and I'm really grateful to both of them for letting me be part of this Salesforce revolution.
In 2012, ExactTarget was acquired and presented at the same year's Dreamforce as the new Salesforce Marketing Cloud, a product completely focused on B2C customer marketing.
2013 saw the birth of the Salesforce1 platform, which brought the whole Salesforce desktop experience to the mobile channel, anticipating the Lightning platform, which was presented a few years later.
In 2014, Trailhead was launched, a fun way to learn Salesforce-related stuff at no cost at all; anyone can create an account and access thousands of free learning modules.
In 20...
