Salesforce.com Exposed -
Customization & Integration

Customization options vary according to which CRM software Edition you purchased. Furthermore, each Edition also imposes specific limitations on the number of customizations that can be made. In our opinion, the allowances should be adequate for the majority of SMB requirements. The toolkit provided is comprehensive albeit a little cumbersome to use. Salesforce.com supports customization across the application including the following: page layout; tabs; list values within fields and default setting; calculated fields or creating validation rules. Earlier we made the comment “cumbersome” due to certain cases when it was not at all intuitive on how to achieve the desired result. For example, when creating a validation rule, accessing the fields we wanted was not possible. As a test case we wanted to create a validation rule to ensure that the ‘Due Date’ for a task was not set in the past. After accessing task validation rules however, the ‘Due Date’ field was not available for selection as an available field. Also, validation rules were defined by creating syntactical constructs not too unlike a programming language. The nature of the user interface places the tool beyond the reach of the average user and depending on technical acumen, potentially beyond many system administrators.

For enterprise users and above, Salesforce.com has extended the customization tool kit to allow interaction with Apex (Salesforce.com’s on demand programming language). The interface at this level is, as expected, at a code level.

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