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