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Salesforce.com today announced Salesforce.com Sites, the ability to write web interfaces on the Force.com platform and make them available to users via the web.

For an example of Sites in action, navigate over to the Dreamforce Attendee Portal.

This is a major breakthough for Salesforce.com on one of it’s weak areas–as CRM relationships become increasingly bi-directional, and more reliant on interactions with the public, it has been hard to give the public access to data inside Salesforce.com.

No longer. Now, full-fledged web applications can be written on top of your core CRM database. You can construct portals for customers, authenticated or not, with an amazing degree of flexibility. Force.com’s Model-View-Controller architecture is in use, giving the developers a full stack in the cloud for writing web apps.

The web experience is written with VisualForce, Salesforce.com’s web templating language. These web pages may have whatever structure and look-and-feel you desire–VisualForce spits out XHTML just like any other web templating language.

Your data lives in Salesforce.com objects, and is accessible via controllers you write in Apex, the server-side language of Force.com.

These programatic pieces are not new as of today they’ve been put into place over the last 3 years. But today Salesforce.com ties them together as a platform for building public web applications that are 100% hosted by Salesforce.com.

When you enable a Site, you get a force.com URL and can also map it to your own branded URL. You set a VisualForce page to act as your home page and you’re off. Hitting that URL now displays the VisualForce to the web user.

Permissions are robust and allow for multiple levels of access. You can have publicly accessible pages, that are available to the unauthenticated masses. You can also integrate with Salesforce.com’s Customer Portal functionality to create sites that authenticate against Contact records in your Salesforce.com CRM. This gives you the power to create multiple customer portals that have the exact web experience you desire.

Because it’s all built right on Salesforce.com, the web user can add/edit/delete any data you have in Salesforce.com, according to the access you give them. This is incredibly powerful, and can be used in myriad business cases where end user input is helpful.

I was given a chance to build an application to help show the power of Sites. I built a distributed phone banking site, based on my.barackobama.com. Distributed phone banking is the practice of allowing your supporters to make phone calls on behalf of your issue. For Obama, it was about calling voters to find out if they were going to vote for him. For an environmental nonprofit, it may be having members call other members to see if they will attend an important hearing, or about calling people who live near a proposed development that will harm the environment.

In my phone banking app, you can give access to any Contacts in your database. They can then login and make calls to people on the call list. It’s a pretty simple application, but the power of extending the business process across the outside edge of the organization is evident.

Sites enables this blurring of the organizational boundry that is incredibly exciting (because… ?). At ONE/Northwest, we’re doing this kind of thing with our Plone Salesforce.com integration and will continue because there is sometimes real value to having your external portal be a part of your web content management system.

For many use cases, Sites will be enough to get the job done. Some ideas that come to mind:

• build major donor portals for enabling donor-fundraising
• create a fully hosted, publicly-accessible, REST web service interface
• create public landing pages for marketing campaigns
• build public forms for information capture
• create an RSS feed for public consumption, or to loosely integrate with your website or anyone else’s

Sites is a big breakthrough, but different from the Apex announcement of 2006 or the VisualForce announcement of 2008. This is a way to extend what you’re already doing to the world. Sites enable opening up your database in controlled ways to your constituents, with the exact look and feel you want. Prepare yourself for a wave of innovative add on products that take advantage of this new way of thinking.

I hope we learn more shortly about the Sites pricing model. At this point all we know is that there will be two models–one based on traffic and another based on user count. I like that Salesforce.com is working on their pricing with respect to Sites–there are many scenarios where the old per-user-only pricing model just won’t work.

Nice work Salesforce.com on coming up with another big Dreamforce announcement. I’ve got a couple groups who will want in on a pilot…

This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 9:08 am and is filed under CRM, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.