Salesforce - A brief introduction
So what is salesforce? Well, when i first got selected to work in the salesforce domain i was really confused. When I heard my interviewer tell me that you will be probably taken up into saleforce team, I thought OMG they are going to put me in marketing section. Maybe due to my expression, he told me that its also a development tool and asked me to search about it.
So, when i searched more about salesforce , It was stated that its a CRM tool
Well what is a CRM tool ?.. lol I was also unfamiliar with that, CRM is Customer Relationship Management Tool .
Ok, what is CRM?
Well it basically deals with communication with the clients , storing of customer data and automation of certain workflows etc.
Lets move on to sales-force,
Ok you might be familiar with tables in database. What is a table used for? We use it to store details about a certain object. Similarly object stores the details or properties of a particular entity. Each attribute of such an object is called a field. We can create custom objects in salesforce which just like the tables.
When we create a custom object we have to give it a name , it will have a default field which will be the key of the table.It can auto number or any value as we decide then we can define rest of the fields in the custom object (ie. the table)
When we create a field we can define the type and name of the field
OK, let me tell you an example
Suppose you have to store the details of a student, here student can be selected as the name of the custom object. OK so we create a custom object student and it will have a primary field Student name which will be a required field.
Now we can define the rest of the fields for student such as
- Address - Long Text
- Phone Number - Phone
- State - Picklist
- District - Picklist
- Known skills - Multi picklist etc
You might be familiar with Long text and Phone data type , A picklist is just like drop-down box
We can make district a related field which will show district only pertaining to a corresponding state.
A multipicklist is one in which we can choose more than one option according to the criteria.
After we create an object we can define validation rules.
We can use workflow rules and process builder to automate on what happens when certain condition are met like automated email alert.
We can define how the layout would be for different users.
Apex is the coding language and we use it in cases to define complicated function and triggers
We can also design the front end using visual-force which uses apex tags and is very similar to HTML tags.
We will define the certain scenarios and basics with examples in coming sessions :)