Unlike Dreamforce statements of years past, Salesforce1 is
shipping upon announcement, available in the form of downloadable mobile apps.
But there's more work to be done if it's going to live up to its billing as a
"next-generation platform" that will connect partners, employees,
customers, and customers' customers through any device with
"state-of-the-art, consumer-grade functionality."
Salesforce services, customizations, reports, dashboards and
other parts of the ecosystem that weren't accessible before on mobile devices
are now "just there" in a new Salesforce1 Mobile App, according to
Benioff. This broadly-capable new app replaces the Chatter Mobile app (and
Benioff says the company has been secretly beta testing Salesforce1 under the "Chatter"
badge for weeks). Salesforce also introduced at Dreamforce new Sales Cloud,
Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud mobile apps said to be built on
Salesforce1's new APIs and mobile capabilities.
Behind the thick marketing spread is a platform that ties
the company’s mobile app strategy into one connected dashboard, which gives it
a foundation to serve four customer constituencies:
Developers: Salesforce executives say Salesforce1 is an
API-first environment. It has, according to Salesforce, 10 times more APIs and
services for apps that point inward for budgeting, as an example, or outward,
with apps for servicing customers such as in retail stores.
ISVs: Companies such as Dropbox can build mobile apps on the
new Salesforce1 AppExchange. The service also ties into Private AppExchange,
which allows customers to manage their own private app stores.
Admins: With Salesforce1, admins can use Force.com’s
Visualforce and custom actions for managing and distributing apps through a
single mobile app platform.
Salesforce1 also comes with ten times as many APIs, and will
target a much wider range of application types, said Benioff. The company’s
Force.com platform has now been integrated with Heroku1, its development
platform for consumer applications, and this is the kicker. Heroku1 will now be
able to access CRM data from Salesforce.com, which companies and developers can
use to build new apps that control all of those billions of objects that will
make up the Internet of Things. We’ve already seen examples of this, such as with
GE, which has placed sensors on its engines and has now built an application to
keep track of them. This data can be integrated into Salesforce1 and accessed
by employees on the go.
Salesforce1 was the big development revealed at
salesforce.com's huge Dreamforce 2013 conference. But many left the conference
wondering the same thing: What exactly is Salesforce1? A new mobile app? New
sales, service, and marketing applications? A new set of application
programming interfaces (APIs)? New development tools? Our analysis gets under
the hood of the announcement, finding that Salesforce1 is “all of the above”
and a big step forward for the company, cementing its position as a top choice
among public cloud development platforms.Why?
Salesforce1 consolidates and modernizes salesforce.com's
mobile client efforts into a single extensible app. There's a gap in offline
work still to be fixed.
The Salesforce1 mobile app required a major refactoring and
expansion of salesforce.com's APIs. Developers now have a much wider range of
functions available to work with salesforce.com's various Web properties. The
new APIs are Restful.
The new APIs opened the door for much better integration
between Heroku and salesforce.com's Web properties. Heroku is the company's
environment for Ruby, Java, and other developers who don't or won't work in
Force.com. Now both development environments are integrated with
salesforce.com's applications and underlying application services.
Salesforce1 is a big set of developments, and addresses one
of our biggest criticisms of the company's cloud platforms: that Force.com,
Heroku, Chatter, and other services aren't well integrated. Well, now they are.
