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One of the reasons I like Salesforce.com as a CRM platform is that they have a really great Application Programing Interface, or API for short. An API is a set of instructions that software developers can use to talk to an application. Through the API, you can make an application jump through hoops without having to click trough the user interface. You can write a little code that can leverage the functionality of another application to accomplish some task–often this is a task that the developers of the application would never think to, or care to, write on their own.

With the advent of Internet applications, smart folks invented a way for an API to be wieldable from afar, and it was dubbed web services. Developers can interact with a web services API from anything connected to the web. All you need is a medium amount of programing ability and an application that has a web servies API to connect to.

Salesforce.com, Google, Amazon.com, and other forward thinking web companies have embraced this way of thinking, and have published their web servies APIs. Seen any Google Maps applications not built by Google? Only possible because of the API. These companies think that giving developers access to their application makes their application more useful–and they are right. By investing time and money in web services, they’re making their applications more useful, and driving use of them. This is a big change in the way software companies think. After spending millions of dollard building out their applications, they open things up, letting you access their functions and data. Ten years ago they would have been thought insane. It’s quite a shift from the historical mind-set that the application code is sacred and if you don’t have the blue badge, you can’t touch it.

Lately I’ve been digging into the Salesforce.com web services API, and it’s been really fun. Salesforce.com has invested a lot of time in building out their API, and it shows. If a hack like me can get Salesforce.com to do my bidding, it shows they’ve done a good job in making it easy to use!

Currently, I’m working on some code that will import online donations into Salesforce.com. The developers at Salesforce.com are never going to write this functionality, but becuase of their web services API, I can do it myself, making Salesforce.com a better CRM for nonprofits.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 1st, 2005 at 9:45 am and is filed under CRM, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.