Point-and-Click

Democratizing Application Customization with Force.com Builder

Who knows more about the way you do business than your power users? And who knows better how an app should work for maximum productivity? In traditional software development, power users with good ideas submitted their requests for functionality to IT—and waited. Since long queues for such customizations were typical and IT often had more urgent priorities, lost productivity and user frustration were commonplace.

Salesforce.com put an end to the IT bottlenecks created by that approach. With the Force.com platform and Force.com Builder, no programming is needed for many types of customization. Power users and administrators can use the Force.com Builder to make customizations themselves; developers can use it to increase their productivity as well. Using Force.com Builder, users point and click to configure the attributes—known as metadata—associated with an application’s objects, which add up to an application’s ”blueprint.” This blueprint is rendered in the user interface whenever an end user interacts with the application. To protect the underlying application, users cannot modify the core code, but must work within the constraints defined by the application’s metadata framework.

Help Users Work Smarter, not Harder

Do your users manage projects by sending multiple emails? Are there delays because of communication snafus? Do you have a way of tracking who did what, and when?

In addition to using Force.com Builder to modify an application’s data model, business logic, and user interface, Force.com Builder works with Salesforce’s workflow automation functionality to streamline processes, minimize administrative overhead, eliminate delays, and improve accountability and response times. Customization of workflow includes:

  • Creating and modifying workflow rules. You can create workflow rules based on any business event, such as opportunities that are closed. As your processes evolve, you can easily modify those rules to keep pace with your changing business needs.
  • Creating and assigning tasks automatically. When business events trigger workflow rules, you can automatically create and assign relevant tasks.
  • Generating task templates automatically. You can define tasks in templates that are automatically populated with standard data such as priority, status, and due dates. 

Create More Customizations More Easily 

Although other vendors allow some configuration with metadata, none match salesforce.com’s breadth and depth of possible customizations without coding. And, as you can see below, none provide anywhere near the power to modify the user interface—or the business processes and workflows behind it—as easily and as quickly as salesforce.com.