Salesforce1 - Introduction to New Platform
At Dreamforce '13 event, Salesforce.com announced new platform Salesforce1 with much hype. It was billed as 'One Customer Platform to Connect'
Salesforce1 is total mobile app development platform for everyone. The main approach of Salesforce is to deliver mobile and social solutions in days or weeks. Apps are driven by metadata and intelligently provide context to the user experience. These apps deliver information-based mobile device features like address can be plotted on maps, phone number can be dialed with simple tap, workflows that feed-centric and much more.
Business users and administrators can develop apps with clicks, not code, complete with powerful workflow rules, approval processes and dynamic user interfaces. Unlike other solutions where business user often create their own IT applications where they have little visibility into their security, Salesforce1 provide administrators the tool to centrally manage apps without limiting the business need to develop their own IT application.
Salesforce1's flexible development model enable every user to create custom apps backed by mobile back-end services and unique mobile user experience. ISV's developing on the Salesforce1 Platform can develop apps that take advantage of advanced packaging and version management control, complete enterprise marketplace capabilities with the AppExchange and feed first discovery of their apps within Salesforce1 Platform.
Salesforce1 - Platform Features
The Salesforce1 Platform delivers below capabilities:
1. Social Data
The feed based approach lets users to focus on what most important to them. The ability to share, follow, collaborate and take business actions directly on data within Salesforce1 is at core of this platform. Salesforce1 allows to be part of the collaboration process with workers, teams, partners and customers. This results into exploring new business apps, hence business productivity.
2. Declarative and Programmatic Development
IT teams always struggled to keep up with new changes needed by business by retaining professional developers, especially those with mobile application development experience. Salesforce1 solve the problem by providing drag-n-drop tools and standards to build completely custom apps and user interfaces. It delivers experience to developers and administrators to create apps on same platform by minimizing efforts to build their own complicated application.
3. Action-Based App Model
Instead of complicated development cycle, apps can be declared through actions such as create an order, set a delivery date and so on. Actions defined via the desktop are instantly available in menus of mobile devices. And for developers, actions are automatically enabled with RESTful endpoints capable of accepting either XML or JSON data envelopes.
4. Connect to Everything with Open API's
Salesforce1 APIs include access to bulk APIs for data loading, social APIs for collaboration anywhere, cutting-edge streaming APIs to support push notification integrations and metadata APIs that describe every aspect of your app.
