During the company’s existence, the number of users of various Salesforce clouds has grown from 2 million to 70 million. Since 2012, the company has been the market leader in CRM-systems and occupies 20% of the entire industry. Today, Salesforce and salesforce development company overtake such giants as Oracle and Microsoft. Companies of global renown collaborate with the platform: DELL, Canon, Western Union, Adidas, Google, Bentley, BMW, Toyota, Spotify, CISCO, American Red Cross.
PowerSync emphasize the importance of the point that Salesforce is much faster than its counterparts and is not limited to the classic CRM features. The site is different and the fact that it is possible to add a lot of things – Salesforce is open to expansion by programmers.
Here’s an easy analogy – buying an apartment in a new building. Let’s say you want to buy a house. You go to the builder and say, “I want my own space, where I want to make repairs and renovate everything to my liking. It’s the same with Salesforce. Customers go to the company, get their own instance or organization where they can automate business processes and build their solutions using the existing resources of the platform.
Table of Contents
Providers in the online services market right now provide these levels of service:
- Infrastructure as a Service.
- Platform as a service.
- Software as a service.
Each of them implies a certain set of tools and components. Each of the above services is designed to take some time and money out of deploying and maintaining an IT service (whether it be a business site, a server in the cloud, or a large corporate project). Salesforce developers and customers typically face two positions provided by the provider – platform and software.
Since most of these services operate on the principle of multi-tenancy (collective rental mode), it is important to note: each cloud system has its own limitations in order to be more scalable. In Salesforce (multi-tenancy), all resources are shared between clients of the same vendor. So you should try not to exceed the limits and not overpay for resources that the customer does not use.
Salesforce is a flexible and cross-platform system, which means it is suitable for creating additional or changing existing functionality. Developers have a separate resource for this – the PaaS platform force.com. It contains tools for writing and deploying applications, defining security access levels, and so on. This resource is used when it is necessary to customize the login process, modify the client UI, create new application components from scratch, integrations, and much more – that is, do everything associated with the customization of the application. Work “under the hood” can be done from the desktop program via the web, or in a dedicated mobile app for end users, developers, and Salesforce administrators.
In 2018, force.com was transformed into Lightning Platform, but you often hear the former name in the developer community as well.
Career path at Salesforce
As of April 2021, the professional grading from Salesforce has more than 20 different certifications. Each career path corresponds to a specific certification. In the Salesforce direction, you can start with a basic role as an administrator or developer, eventually delving into marketing (and passing the exam as a Pardot Specialist) or consulting. Interested in commerce? Get certified as a CPQ expert. For the most determined and ambitious, there’s the honorary role of Systems Architects. “Infinity is not the limit,” the creators of Salesforce declare. Indeed, skills can be pumped up in many directions. However, in this article, I’d like to focus on the basic positions: Salesforce Administrator and Salesforce Developer. Let’s take a closer look at them.
Salesforce Administrator
A basic and essential role in Salesforce. Don’t think it’s his job to set up computer networks, operating systems, and so on. The specialist helps users with just about everything.
He or she can do everything from helping users develop analytics and reports, to resetting passwords (when a user can’t get the numbers right for the 15th time), to maintaining data quality, adding new database objects, editing existing ones, and backing up the organization.
Salesforce Developer
From personal experience, I can say that the direction will suit those who do not like to develop everything from scratch. The platform provides many ready-made components, which you can then improve and customize. Here you have native languages for the server side, here is a special framework for the UI. There’s always the Visual Studio Code and Salesforce CLI code editor at your fingertips. If you like frontend and backend development equally and want to be a Full Stack dev, you’re in Salesforce. In this position, you can do both UI customization and backend logic to help automate the system.
The capabilities of an administrator on the platform are quite extensive, but they still have the standard point-and-click tools that PowerSync provides:
- validation rules;
- Flow and Process Builder;
- approval processes;
- tools to customize interface components;
- notifications;
- work with user profiles;
- data management, and so on.
While the Salesforce developer can customize the platform and change it beyond recognition. These roles are closely related. To effectively customize the system, the developer must understand whether the admin tools can accomplish the task. If they aren’t enough, the programmer creates or customizes some components from scratch.
Developing for Salesforce involves close interaction with the client. And it is bound to become part of your daily responsibilities. It is necessary to understand the business model of the customer, his standard processes, to clarify the requirements and goals of automation, and the result will not keep you waiting long. The ability to negotiate productively has a positive impact on professional growth.
The platform itself encourages professionals to learn new things and improve their skills: it constantly releases webinars, updates materials for self-learning. Another effective (and familiar to you) way to improve your skills is Salesforce certifications. You can also learn about the tools and benefits of the platform from PowerSync lectures.