Hello,

I have been researching Force.com as a potential platform for an application I will be developing for a client ( an existing salesform.com CRM customer ). As a person who has not used any Force.com service as either an end-user or developer, I have a couple of questions.

Just as a bit of background, other platforms that I have considered are Sharepoint and standard LAMP or ASP/ADO.NET web technologies, however both of these have drawbacks:

1. Sharepoint has been disregarded as the amount and complexity of the data the client will store is too large / complex for the Sharepoint list mechanism to handle, and connection to an external RDBMS within the client's network is not available.
2. An external web application will have to implement all the security and access controls, and will take more work to integrate into the client's existing workflow.

The application in question will be a private application, and has the following characteristics:

• < 100 users. These users will have salesforce.com CRM accounts
• Multiple levels of access permision ( 5 or more )
• Reasonably complex relational data model with 15+ custom entities. Number of attributes per entity is unknown at this point, but you can assume it will be between 20-100.
• Between 100,000 - 200,000 records stored at any one time in the database.

So, my questions are:

1. As the client is an existing salesforce.com CRM customer, do they have access to the force.com platform by default, or will this be an additional cost?
2. Are there any limitations to the force.com database that would make it difficult to implement my data model?
3. How difficult will it be to deploy an application developed on force.com to my client's salesforce.com environment?
4. I have read the governor restrictions, though without having done any development on the platform they don't mean much to me. How likely am I to run into these restrictions given the application requirements above?

I'd appreciate any advice you could give me on this matter, as the client is eager to begin development asap.

Thanks,

Jeremy

Hello,

I have been researching Force.com as a potential platform for an application I will be developing for a client ( an existing salesform.com CRM customer ). As a person who has not used any Force.com service as either an end-user or developer, I have a couple of questions.

Just as a bit of background, other platforms that I have considered are Sharepoint and standard LAMP or ASP/ADO.NET web technologies, however both of these have drawbacks:

1. Sharepoint has been disregarded as the amount and complexity of the data the client will store is too large / complex for the Sharepoint list mechanism to handle, and connection to an external RDBMS within the client's network is not available.
2. An external web application will have to implement all the security and access controls, and will take more work to integrate into the client's existing workflow.

The application in question will be a private application, and has the following characteristics:

• < 100 users. These users will have salesforce.com CRM accounts
• Multiple levels of access permision ( 5 or more )
• Reasonably complex relational data model with 15+ custom entities. Number of attributes per entity is unknown at this point, but you can assume it will be between 20-100.
• Between 100,000 - 200,000 records stored at any one time in the database.

So, my questions are:

1. As the client is an existing salesforce.com CRM customer, do they have access to the force.com platform by default, or will this be an additional cost?
2. Are there any limitations to the force.com database that would make it difficult to implement my data model?
3. How difficult will it be to deploy an application developed on force.com to my client's salesforce.com environment?
4. I have read the governor restrictions, though without having done any development on the platform they don't mean much to me. How likely am I to run into these restrictions given the application requirements above?

I'd appreciate any advice you could give me on this matter, as the client is eager to begin development asap.

Thanks,

Jeremy