Mobile App Builder FAQ
Defining “enterprise cloud platform” begins with understanding cloud computing. At the most basic level, cloud computing solutions deliver data and application functionality through the web, rather than having them reside on a user’s desktop/laptop/mobile device, hardware drive, or in what are otherwise known as on-premises solutions.
As a result, IT departments no longer need to worry about buying and provisioning servers to hold company data and can instead focus on creating applications that help the business run faster. And they don’t have to worry about installing applications on every device for every user in a business. Instead, users with web access simply log in to an app to access, share, and collaborate on relevant data and business processes immediately.
Enterprise cloud platforms are specifically designed to help drive every department of a business with apps. The apps you build can scale for growth, allow for customisation (by developers, IT departments, business users, or all three), and are highly secure.
Salesforce has been a leader in enterprise cloud computing since 1999, virtually creating the category. Today, Salesforce has more than 100,000 customers and continues to be a recognised leader in cloud computing for businesses of all sizes, and in nearly every industry.
Salesforce Platform brings together all the tools and services that have made us the world's #1 enterprise cloud platform. With a unified ecosystem for building, managing, buying, and optimising apps — all built on Salesforce's trusted cloud infrastructure — Salesforce Platform empowers CIOs with everything they need to quickly build apps in any language, for any device, and manage them all in a single enterprise cloud environment.
On-premises solutions require the IT department to build the entire solution on its own, from the servers to the code database. While that means granular control of hardware, software, infrastructure, and networking, it’s expensive, time consuming, and resource-intensive. Upgrades are hard to manage and it’s not always easy to move the technology forward in pace with changing business needs.
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provides raw data center capacity so that IT can take advantage of virtual machines, managed storage and networks, shared physical and network security. IaaS also means IT benefits from utility pricing that changes proportionally as you scale. However, IaaS still requires heavy IT involvement for integrating data, as well as building and maintaining apps and users.
Platform as a service (PaaS) offers everything IaaS delivers, as well the operating systems, middleware, runtime, and most importantly, highly configurable prebuilt visual development tools that allow IT and others in the business to build and deploy apps quickly, and integrate data from other sources like SAP and Oracle, and the tools and services to manage it all.
Software as a service (SaaS) delivers packaged apps that are ready to go for users with a web browser and internet access. The apps, built on a cloud database from an underlying platform, typically deliver software on a monthly subscription. Salesforce has been a leader in SaaS since 1999.
Salesforce was the first company to deliver PaaS to companies around the world, and it delivers it as few others do or can.
For customers using Salesforce apps like Sales Cloud, Salesforce Platform makes it possible to bring a deeply customised user experience to any device and any employee. It also offers employees Chatter, a social collaboration platform designed for business that lets them securely share files and collaborate on work, find experts quickly, create working groups with vendors and customers outside the company, and more.
Companies can also use Salesforce Platform to quickly build apps that deliver amazing customer experiences, connect employees within the organisation, automate business processes across the company or within a department, and integrate data from third parties into apps built on the platform. Because any apps made on Salesforce Platform are 100% cloud, built API-first, they can be made mobile instantly. There are no servers to find and provision, security is built-in, setup for analytics and reporting is already taken care of, and Salesforce Platform's shared data model ensures that data is not siloed, meaning it’s available everywhere, on any device.
In short, Lightning delivers everything your team needs to build engaging experiences and work easier and faster.
Heroku Enterprise also allows developers to build in any programming language rather than just Apex, including Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Python, Java, and more. Heroku apps can run on any device and can link to social accounts so that customers can like, share, and take other public actions straight from the app.
Heroku Connect is a powerful bridge between Heroku Enterprise and the Salesforce Platform that creates a bidirectional sync of data between the two environments. With this link, businesses can unlock the power of customer data from their Salesforce Platform instance inside their Heroku apps.
Lightning Platform empowers users with both technical and non-technical backgrounds to build apps fast, automate business processes, and engage employees in communities.
Org Security: Salesforce protects your organisation's data from all other customer organisations by using a unique identifier that restricts access at every level to your data from anyone outside of your company — including us.
User Security: User authentication (both delegated and SAML) combined with network-level security by IP address, session restrictions, and audit trails provide control and visibility into what users are doing in the system and their field history.
Programmatic Security: Configurable, authenticated sessions secure access to logic, data, and metadata. Salesforce even offers a source code scanner that produces a report analysing the security of your code.
Trust and Visibility: Trust starts with transparency. Salesforce displays real-time information on system performance and security, and offers tips on best security practices for your organisation. Learn more at trust.salesforce.com.
Salesforce Platform is built on a multitenant infrastructure, which means that your apps are run on a shared data center, lowering costs and reducing the need to devote resources (time, money, and people) to maintenance. The robust and flexible security architecture of the platform is trusted by companies around the world, including those in the most heavily regulated industries — from financial services to healthcare to government — and it provides the highest level of security and control over everything from user and client authentication through administrative permissions, to the data access and sharing model, including:
Org Security: Salesforce protects your organisation's data from all other customer organisations by using a unique identifier that restricts access at every level to your data from anyone outside of your company — including us. User Security: User authentication (both delegated and SAML) combined with network-level security by IP address, session restrictions, and audit trails provides control and visibility into what users are doing in the system and their field history.
Programmatic Security: Configurable, authenticated sessions secure access to logic, data, and metadata. Salesforce even offers a source code scanner that produces a report analysing the security of your code.
Trust and Visibility: Trust starts with transparency. Salesforce displays real time information on system performance and security, and offers tips on best security practices for your organisation. Learn more at: trust.salesforce.com.
In addition to components, Lightning also offers tools that help developers, IT, and business users do more, quickly. These tools include: Lightning App Builder and Process Builder to create custom apps with complex business logic and beautiful user interfaces that work on any device. Lightning Connect to seamlessly and quickly integrate third-party data from sources like SAP, Oracle, MSFT, and others.
Salesforce Lightning brings these same component framework concepts to the enterprise, offering a set of premade components to start. This means developers and IT now have a framework that components can easily be made on, and in turn, used to assemble apps.
Salesforce also offers developers and partners the capability to create their own components, which means businesses can compose apps with premade components from Salesforce, make their own custom components, or use components made by AppExchange partners. Salesforce Lightning tools also allow these premade components to be assembled and reassembled specifically for any screen with drag-and-drop ease.
On Salesforce Platform, custom objects are the building blocks that make an app. Every user of an app needs access to the objects that are in that app, so every person accessing apps requires a subscription.
What’s included:
Powerful apps with access to 10 custom objects per user
A customisable employee app
Mobile Services and SDK
Workflow and approvals
Sharing and user access
Salesforce Identity
Chatter
Point-and-click development
Real-time APIs
Reports and dashboards
Private AppExchange
Cloud database
You don’t need to be a developer or know code to create new business applications; it’s as simple as pointing and clicking, then dragging and dropping components. You can try point-and-click development now by visiting our free Trailhead tutorial.
Developer edition is a free personal Salesforce instance (org) that has all the capabilities of our Employee Apps license to set up users, create objects, add business logic, and ultimately create and deploy an app.
A Developer edition account cannot be converted to a production account.
Event Monitoring lets customers see who is accessing what data from where and monitor user and system activity.
Field Audit Trail lets customers define a complete data lifecycle policy, letting them understand the state of data at any time for up to 10 years and easily comply with industry and financial regulations.
Platform Encryption lets customers seamlessly encrypt sensitive data at rest while still allowing business users to preserve key Salesforce features like search, workflow, and validation rules.
Because Salesforce Shield is built native on the Salesforce Platform, it is seamlessly integrated into all your Salesforce apps. Customers can turn on Salesforce Shield in an afternoon.
Customers maintain full control over the keys and key lifecycle, ensuring the privacy and confidentiality of that data to meet both external and internal data compliance needs. Because Platform Encryption is built natively in Salesforce, data can be encrypted throughout the Salesforce ecosystem, including in partner apps built by ISVs on AppExchange.