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MrdiniMrdini 

Access to Salesforce by non-Salesforce customers?

Hullo all,

Having recently come away very impressed by the Visualforce video, I have a query...

Is there a way to create a Salesforce page that will let the great unwashed mass input/modify data directly in our SFDC database, without needing to be a Salesforce user? (obviously, there will be access restrictions required).

Reason I ask is - so far, pretty much everything I've done works as follows:-
Form page on our server -> database -> PHP script -> SF API -> SF.

Is it possible to simplify this down to:-
Form page on SF site -> SF.

TIA!
benjasikbenjasik
Not yet, but feel free to post this on the Idea Exchange, would be a great idea!
werewolfwerewolf
Well, Salesforce.com does have Web2Case and Web2Lead. These allow "the unwashed masses," as you say, to post data directly to your Salesforce.com instance in the form of cases or leads respectively. Web2Case and Web2Lead are not hosted by Salesforce.com, but are HTML forms that you can put on your own pages; these HTML forms post directly to Salesforce.com, relieving you of having to create a PHP page or servlet to handle the post and send the data to SFDC.
MrdiniMrdini


werewolf wrote:
Well, Salesforce.com does have Web2Case and Web2Lead. These allow "the unwashed masses," as you say, to post data directly to your Salesforce.com instance in the form of cases or leads respectively. Web2Case and Web2Lead are not hosted by Salesforce.com, but are HTML forms that you can put on your own pages; these HTML forms post directly to Salesforce.com, relieving you of having to create a PHP page or servlet to handle the post and send the data to SFDC.


What you say is true. However, in our  experience, we have found web2case/lead to be very, very limited - we actually went from web2lead to the SF API due to the limitations.
Basically - we do lot of massaging the data before finally inputtting it in SF, i.e. checking for an already-existing email address & then updating an existing lead - sommething that isn't possible with web2lead AFAIK. (We were getting into duplicate hell with web2lead).
MrdiniMrdini


benjasik wrote:
Not yet, but feel free to post this on the Idea Exchange, would be a great idea!


Not to contradict you or anything! But won't VisualForce allow me to do what I'm asking for, anyway?

(The only problem with VisualForce being that it isn't here yet! And won't be for a long time!)
werewolfwerewolf
It's true that Web2Case and Web2Lead are limited strictly to inbound data entry.  You could use Apex triggers to prevent duplicate entries.
 
Have you looked at the Customer Portal at all?
SuperfellSuperfell
VisualForce requires there to be a logged in user.
MrdiniMrdini

werewolf wrote:
It's true that Web2Case and Web2Lead are limited strictly to inbound data entry.  You could use Apex triggers to prevent duplicate entries.

Hmm, perhaps, perhaps not. But in any case, this is an custom object I want to "expose" to the public, not cases or leads. And web2case/lead _definitely_ won't cut it for what I want to do.

Have you looked at the Customer Portal at all?

*Reads* Oooohhh, shiny. *Reaches the pricing stuff* *Winces*. No - very much not workable. I guess I might as well describe my "problem" in short. (It's not really a "problem" per se, as I can always go down the route I've used in the past - but then, what's the point of this thread! :D)
Basically, my company sells widgets, for which we require an unique ID from every user we sell to. Whilst the current setup works, it would be really nice to be able to integrate this into SF somehow, so that users can enter their unique ID directly into the SF object. This would mean I wouldn't need to faff about with transferring data from our database to SF's database via the API.

Now, since we sell several hundred/thousand of these widgets, paying per user for the customer portal is a bit *winces*.

Guess Idea Exchange it is then...