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steveric General question for evaluating Salesforce
My company is considering moving to Salesforce (running away from NetSuite). Having been burned before with sales guy's promises, I would love to find out from the user community the experience (at least from the IT point of view) as it pertains to the following:
1. Web Services:
a. How robust are they? Many glitches? Speed (esp. during business hours)?
b. Are there any known limitations. E.g., can Web Services read and write all custom fields and custom tables? Any large sections of functionality that aren't exposed by the API? (I've seen in other posts that the definition of custom fields cannot currently be done, but I assume that once defined you can query/add/update those custom fields on records?)
c. Is it plausible to have a custom application that does, say, ten SOAP messages per minute to the Salesforce web service? Are there licensing issues with number of records/requests/kilobytes per day/user/whatever and if so is it difficult to make an integration with a custom app work within those restrictions?
2. Quote/Configuration Add-ons:
a. We know that Salesforce currently doesn't have a quoting capability. We looked at several options, such as QuoteASP (pricey at $55 per month per user, and limited configuration possibilities), but are wondering if this is the best one that integrates with Salesforce, and if there are any open source or other options?
b. Our requirements for quote/configuration are these: we only sell basically one item, but it has 3 parameters, each from a finite list. The unit price of the item is a function of all 3 parameters (it is not obtained by adding factors associated with each parameter separately), so it can be only determined by a table lookup.
3. Support:
a. How knowledgeable is their support team from the perspective of an IT guy on the client side who is responsible for implementation/administration?
Thanks a lot for any specific answers or general advice or other war stories.
Steve
1. Web Services:
a. How robust are they? Many glitches? Speed (esp. during business hours)?
b. Are there any known limitations. E.g., can Web Services read and write all custom fields and custom tables? Any large sections of functionality that aren't exposed by the API? (I've seen in other posts that the definition of custom fields cannot currently be done, but I assume that once defined you can query/add/update those custom fields on records?)
c. Is it plausible to have a custom application that does, say, ten SOAP messages per minute to the Salesforce web service? Are there licensing issues with number of records/requests/kilobytes per day/user/whatever and if so is it difficult to make an integration with a custom app work within those restrictions?
2. Quote/Configuration Add-ons:
a. We know that Salesforce currently doesn't have a quoting capability. We looked at several options, such as QuoteASP (pricey at $55 per month per user, and limited configuration possibilities), but are wondering if this is the best one that integrates with Salesforce, and if there are any open source or other options?
b. Our requirements for quote/configuration are these: we only sell basically one item, but it has 3 parameters, each from a finite list. The unit price of the item is a function of all 3 parameters (it is not obtained by adding factors associated with each parameter separately), so it can be only determined by a table lookup.
3. Support:
a. How knowledgeable is their support team from the perspective of an IT guy on the client side who is responsible for implementation/administration?
Thanks a lot for any specific answers or general advice or other war stories.
Steve
Our web services are very robust. We have been exposing web services almost since the beginnging of the company, and our current Enterprise and Partner WSDL are battle tested. Over 20% of our total traffic is through our web services. Our client applications: Outlook Edition, Offline Edition, and Office Edition all use our web services APIs. So do all of our partners. We have a very active partner ecosystem, you can see a list of the partner applications at: http://www.salesforce.com/partners/solutions.jsp.
I encourage you to sign up for a free developer edition account and try out our web services for yourself. The free signup is at http://www.sforce.com/orderEntry/signup.jsp.
We do our best to expose everything you need to be successful. Custom objects, custom fields, and pretty much every property are exposed to you. While you are correct that you cannot create custom objects and fields through the API today, we are working on this. However, as soon as you add custom objects and fields, they immediately show up in your WSDL.
10 messages/minute is something we can easily handle. There are no limitations today as to what you can do. We have batch calls, so you can pass many records in a single call, which helps improve performance. We also have an excellent tool for data loading, the Sforce Data Loader. You can download this in the setup area of the application, and it's also an open source project you can get and modify at http://sforce.sf.net. Another great free tool is the Sforce Explorer, which you can download in the same place.
I'm not super familiar with our partner quoting solutions, but I'd encourage you to work with a Sales Rep who would be know more about partner solutions in that area.
As for support, I think you'll find the support excellent. In addition to the fact that we have API support if you log a case, you can get support from the community on these message boards.
Let us know how else we can help out.
Message Edited by benjasik on 08-20-2005 12:09 PM
1a. The web services are fairly robust. Perfect, no, but nothing ever is. It does get better with each release, tho. Glitches are rare, very rare. There are bugs found from time to time, usually around a new release, but the critical ones are addressed pretty quickly. As far as speed goes you'll find it very good. I have a .Net integration that monitors objects in the system for updates on a constant basis. It's not uncommon for that application to make 30-40 calls per minute, and up to 300 per minute if it's making alot of updates. We have another integration that makes about 30 calls to the API (in parallel) in about 12 seconds. Right now speed within a call is excellent -- the key for the future is reducing the number of calls.
1b. There are two things in the API that we run into, but very rarely. First each campaign in the system can have it's won set of statuses. (Sent/Responded are the default, but you can add/delete for each campaign individually). The API currently does not expose which campaign has which valid member response states. It's not a hard workaround -- especially if you don't change the defaults. The second is while events can contain multiple users/contacts/leads as invitees, you can't manage their invitations (add/change/delete) from the API. As far as 'large sections' go, I really don't see anything large. You do, however, mention that you can't customize the app from the API (add a custom field somewhere via the API), and that is correct. Most people are looking for this functionality to make updating a test/dev/live instance easier. If you only have one instance, you may find it's not needed.
1c. You won't have a problem there, Enterprise edition comes with 1GB of storage. (Each record is 1-2K depending, more for documents/attachments/etc.) 10 hits to the API server a minute would put you quite below the radsr I can assure you. The only time I had the API rate-limit me one of my test apps was stuck in an infinite loop spawning threads that hit the API servers. I must have had over 50-70 open TCP connections to the API server when it threw the first error. (Your mileage may vary)
2. I'm going to follow Benji's advice on this one. Talk to one of the Sales Engineers and see what some of the partner tools can do for you -- or you may want to go off and write your own.
3. Its tough to answer the support question but I can definately say that the support infrastructure is generally better then most. It's currently in a growth phase so you will get some support reps who are better then others. It's hard to put it in your perspective because at my level I have a very solid background on the platform, and some of the inner workings, so support for me is basically an interface layer to get the information I already have to someone who can do something about it, usually QA, a developer, or Product Manager.
If you want to contact me off the forum with some more specific questions feel free: my email address is brianr(_at_)warped-minds(_dot_)com
I can't say anything about the web services stuff but I can recommend a Quote/Proposal system.
Take a look at QuoteWerks. Pretty powerful, network installed, cheap concurrent user licensed.
http://www.quotewerks.com
We've just installed this and it does way more than we need.
I agree, quote works is an excellent tool that will support all of your quoting needs however, you can use the salesforce.com products addon with some calculating fields to build a no frills quoting system. If you want something more complex you can build a custom object for quotes.
Let me know if you want more info on any of the above.