Salesforce has announced the general availability of Force.com Sites, which was demoed last year at the Dreamforce event. With it, companies can build and run any website on Salesforce’s cloud platform Force.com, the same platform that runs the company’s sales and service apps.
Salesforce says with Force.com sites, you can build and roll out sites five times faster at about half the cost of traditional software platforms. A few examples the company provides in its showcase include:
– A Starbucks volunteer coordination site
– A Future Leaders teacher recruitment site
– A Qualcomm venture capital site
– A NJ Transit group ticket sales site
– A Lincvolt non-profit site
– A Cathedral Partners business marketplace site, and
– A ThomasNet recruiting site
A few of these and others are looked at in the following clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tf_WaD52mI“A revolutionary new capability of the Force.com platform, Force.com Sites allows you to run your Web site and Web applications in our cloud. No hardware. No software. No infrastructure required. Just your Sites and our Cloud,” explains Gordon Evans on the Salesforce Blog. “Over the last few months, 85 companies had access to the Force.com Sites customer preview. The sites and apps they built had 38 million page views and served more than 5 terabytes of data.”
Force.com walks users through the process of setting up a database, building out workflow rules – email alerts and approval processes. Pages are coded with RUI framework and standard web technologies like HTML, Flash, javascript and CSS. Users can configure their sites with their own domain name or get one from Salesforce. RSS feeds are also available for enabling.
The company says that since users’ sites are run on their cloud infrastructure, they are more secure, and more reliable. They say users don’t have to worry about hardware, a software stack, back ups, performance tuning, security, or upgrades.
Salesforce is letting Force.com users build and run their first site for free. This should be an attractive offer for quite a few people.
