Salesforce the Beginning

Salesforce is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions website, used by large and small companies and also enthusiastic individuals. Salesforce is a website which you login to and which will hold all your companies data and applications with user privileges. Using Salesforce is known as “cloud computing”.

What is cloud computing?

This is a big question at the moment. My understanding of it is, managing normal business processes online, for instance, accessing data and using applications. Instead of storing data and assessing applications on you own servers, your data is stored on Salesforce high security servers that are accessible online with a user login.

Some advantages of cloud computing:

• Low cost systems and applications with a monthly fee, you only pay for what you want e.g. traffic, bandwidth, users, memory and applications.

• Salesforce take care of upgrades, storage, and security.

• Updates do not affect systems already in place. (Everything will still work as normal after updates e.g. security).

• The systems and applications are fully customisable to improve and modify to benefit your needs.

• Straightforward application development with point and click settings.

For more information on Salesforce click here, also see video to understand cloud computing here.

My First Xactium Project

I have now officially started my placement from 1st July 2009 and I have developed a Newsletter application in Salesforce that is being used by Xactium. The current functionality of the newsletter is that a user can create a Newsletter by simply creating a newsletter instance by entering the title, issue name and date. Then, within the Newsletter you can add articles that each have a title and content. You can also add events that each have a event name and description. The user only needs to understand simple HTML to create the newsletter with links and lists. The newsletter design is created by a visualforce email template which adds the data that the user has entered to the newsletter. The user can submit the template by accessing the newsletter instance and clicking a custom button that finds all the leads and contacts that have subscribed to the newsletter, then clicking the send button. There is also the option of sending a test email to the user to check the result in an email provider. The same visualforce email template is used on the Xactium website to show all newsletters that have been processed and set live on the website.

See the newsletter here.

Thank you for reading. Please contact me for information about this blog.

Also see my website here

Xactium the Beginning

I have started my placement at Xactium Ltd, which is based in Sheffield. I have been welcomed into the team and quickly given tasks to gain knowledge of their organisation and SalesForce. Xactium is OEM strategic partners of SalesForce, which develop Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) programs in significantly shorter timescales and at lower cost than traditional approaches. Xactium create business solutions and general-purpose enterprise utilities that integrate into SalesForce.

List of solutions:
• Risk Manager - Provides support for risk assessment, monitoring, management
and reporting, to give organizations a full risk picture, and in turn, full control
over their risks.
• Policy Manager - Supports a comprehensive and consistent process for managing
the lifecycle of corporate policies and their exceptions, including policy approval,
distribution and objective setting.
• Case Manager - Provides market leading support for tracking incidents and their
resolution.
• Compliance Manager - Provides support for a wide variety of compliance management
activities, including recording communications with regulators, breach reporting and
approvals, regulation tracking, and associated workflows.
• Loss Manager - Supports the analysis, management and reporting of corporate loss
events to ensure efficient response and optimal recovery.

List of general purpose enterprise utilities:
• Force Visualizer – A powerful application for visualizing SalesForce and Force.com data
as diagrams in a radial, graphical, non-linear manner.
• PDF Designer - A native Force.com application for designing document templates and
generating pdf documents from Force.com data.

My job title is software developer which involves developing applications that integrates into the SalesForce website. The main developing tools I will be using are Apex, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and Sforce Object Query Language (SOQL). I have finished working through the SalesForce workbook this week, which is free online on SalesForce website and you can also sign up for a free developers edition and try it out.

Next weeks blog is going to talk about SalesForce and it’s use.

Welcome

Hello and welcome to my website, here I will be keeping a blog of my work placement at Xactium Ltd.I will inform you of what I have been doing and what projects I am currently developing.

I have currently finished my second year of university at Sheffield Hallam studying Software Engineering. I am hoping for a first for this year if everything goes ok.

I will be developing this website over the next year so feel free to keep checking for updates. If you are a web developer my source code is easily accessible and feel free to learn from it, if you would like to contact me about any part of this website please do and e-mail me at petergascoyne8@gmail.com.

Thank you for reading