Salesforce.com Exposed -
Industry Solutions

Salesforce.com offers templates to support vertical industries through the AppExchange directory.

Examples include financial services, public sector, high tech and media and communications. While these templates lack the real depth of functionality to claim industry specialization, they may provide a good point of initiation for organizations seeking a relatively fast solution. Pricing for these industry templates is often (but not always) free.

Real depth in any industry will otherwise be sourced from AppExchange partners (usually at a cost).

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SALESFORCE.COM WORKFLOW

With the exception of lead and case routing, Salesforce.com’s workflow capabilities are available only in the Enterprise and Unlimited editions. The bases of Salesforce.com’s workflow are rule based. This means that when specific events (rules) occur within the software a series of actions can be executed.

Examples quoted by Salesforce.com include the following:

• Tasks - Assign a new task to a user, role, or record owner.
• Email Alerts - Send an email to one or more recipients you specify.
• Update the value of a field on a record.

Each workflow consists of:

• Criteria that cause a workflow rule to “execute” or be “triggered”.
• Actions that execute immediately and/or time delayed actions that execute according to time triggers.

One limitation is that fact that the qualifying criteria can only be combined using AND statements. There is also no ability to execute a workflow rule based on a deletion event. The actions supported are as follows:

• New task
• New email
• New field update
• New outbound message

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Salesforce.com also offers a host of workflow applications from AppExchange such as SNAP – a Workflow Optimizer that purports to allow business process automation that extends beyond the limitations of Salesforce.com’s workflow. Other popular tools in this category are used for specific targeted business workflows such as proposal creation, solution pricing or contract management. Again, the objective of these AppExchange offerings (priced and supported independently of SFDC) is to enhance base level functionality.

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