Force.com Sites

Have you seen the stuff that developers are building with Force.com Sites? Check it out by visiting the Sites Gallery: http://developer.force.com/sitesgallery

Force.com Sites is a new feature offered by Salesforce.com. It was announced at Dreamforce'08 (where Salesforce previewed the LincVolt website), and it remains in Developer Preview mode. Force.com Sites allows companies to build websites fully integrated with the custom databases and applications they've already deployed on the Force.com platform.

The site showcased in the image above, for instance, is GameCraze. It was developed by EDL Consulting, and won the category of "Best Visual Presentation" for the recent Force.com Sites Developer Challenge. It doesn't look anything like the Salesforce.com UI that you might know -- but it's running on the same technology.

Most impressively, the site was built in less than one week. Admittedly, it's only a shell, not a real video game website, but it is a great example of what a team of developers can quickly crank out using Salesforce. With a bit more work, the site could be integrated with the standard/custom Salesforce objects that track customers, suppliers, game store inventory, and online sales. The "Holy Grail" of integrating your front-end website with your back-end database is all built into the concept behind Force.com Sites.

Why is this so important? Think of all the headaches a company might normally go through to build their corporate website or intranet:

- purchasing, installing and configuring web servers, firewalls, database servers
- purchasing, installing, licensing backend databases
- purchasing and installing software applications for building and managing their web content
- annual maintenance fees for all of those things

If EDL had been designing the GameCraze site using traditional methods, the purchased hardware wouldn't even arrive in the time it took them to fully deploy this website on Force.com. Before they went public, their upfront costs would be in the tens of thousands of dollars, pushing back their ROI and break-even. But Force.com sites is "pay as you use", meaning they can build and deploy their web store very quickly, and with minimal up front costs.



Today, Sites is only available as a Developer Preview (the rest of us call that "Beta"). That's one of the reasons you see only a dozen or so sits currently showcased on the Sites Gallery. While many of these have been built by the design teams at Salesforce.com, I'm really looking forward to seeing what John Q. Publicy is currently building, and watching the Sites Gallery grow.

If you'd like to learn more, or even jump into the Customer pilot program, you can check out the Sites FAQ

Why I Do This

A great many people have asked me why I blog, why I Twitter, why I Facebook, why I Flickr -- why I do any of it. My wife asked me that question as I sat down to write a blog entry one night. My boss asked after noticing TweetDeck running on my laptop. My Dad inferred the question when he commented that while doing some online ancestry research, my name was coming back again and again while his spider bot searched for the surname "Seabury". And truthfully, Dad answered the question without even asking it.

We live in the era of the Social Web. If you spend any amount of time doing contributing content to the web, then you have effectively created a digital identity. Every time you create or even reply to a blog post, add comments to a message forum, upload or mark a favorite video, interact on Twitter -- all of this information is stored, archived, indexed -- and therefore viewable to the public and subject to their interpretation.

Eight years ago, before blogging was trendy and when the web didn't have a "2.0" after it, an office mate jokingly had everyone Google their name. We sat around the same terminal, and watched as people typed their name and pulled up the search results. Many of us didn't have any results returned at all, others had a few links, but they were of other people with the same surname. When I typed my name, I was surprised - no shocked - at the return results.

The return results didn't just fill the page - they filled several pages. Mostly articles that I had written for our Customer Support center, which frankly I didn't realize were viewable to the outside world. I was, then, web-naive.

It's only been in the last few years that I've come to see Google for what it is: my online resume. I don't mean to be so possesive about it, but that's what it is. Everything I do on the web is now out there in the public domain.

It's important for me to be proactive in managing this tool, the internet, as a way of marketing myself. Not because I'm looking for a job today, but because I might be looking for a job some day (and the day you're looking for a job, it's kinda too late to start branding yourself).

There is a risk of putting so much of yourself "out there" on the web for others to see -- but with risk comes reward. My social media connections through Twitter, Facebook and this blog have been incredibly helpful to me. I've learned from them more than they've learned from me. I can get answers on technical questions from this network far faster than I can through traditional channels (support calls into understaffed support centers). I've been invited to speak at user conferences, been asked to join review boards, and have received unsolicited job offers -- all very flattering, but attributed entirely to the fact that I am "doing this".

The web is not just database of information buckets for you to search. It's not just your online news medium. The web is a tool for you to market yourself, brand yourself, and make your identity known by a far wider circle of influencers than you might be exposed to in your daily work and social life.

Don't shy away from it. Take advantage of it!