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Lab 06: Software as a Service
Table of Contents
Lab 06: Software as a Service
By Laureline David & Michaël Rohrer
Pedagogical Objectives
- Become familiar with a business application provided in a SaaS model
- Explore data integration points
- Explore strategies and mechanisms to avoid vendor lock-in
Introduction
What is Saleforce ?
Salesforce is a Customer Relationship Management solution that can help company to have a better understanding of its customers. It is built to bring together all the customer information of a company in a single, integrated platform that enables it to build a customer-centred business from marketing right through to sales, customer service and business analysis.
Task 1: Subscribe to the Salesforce1 free trial
Aime of the task
The aime of this task was to set up a free 30-day trial account and log into it. As we can see this task has been completed successfully.
Task 2: Become familiar with the application
Aime of the task
The aime of this task was to become familiar with the Salesforce application. As we can see, it has been completed successfully.
Task 3: Assess data import capabilities
Suppose you are working for a company where customer data is held in a master database and various on-premises applications update the data continously. Sketch a solution to update the data in Salesforce1 every day.
Currently there's no inbuilt option to connect directly Salesforce with a database. However, we can connect or sync to an external database using an integration service or web-service, like a REST API.
We can find further information on this link : https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=000109985&type=1
Task 4: Prepare for a vendor switch
Aime of the task
The aime of this task was to export the data from Saleforce to switch to another vendor solution. A small amount of data had to be exported but it took us about 5 minuts to retrive all our data.
What is vendor lock-in ?
The term vendor lock-in define the situation in which a customer is dependant on a vendor and can't easily migrate to another vendor solution.
Is the data in a format that seems useful to you ?
The data are in the csv format. This is a format that is easy to parse. However, the exportes data contain a lot of file themselves containing Saleforce tables with some Saleforce data structure that are not usefull for the customer. Thoes structur are only useful if he want to make another Saleforce deployement with thoes exported data. So thoes data can't be used easily to switch to another vendor solution.
How many tables does the data consist of ?
It contains 118 CSV files which mean that it contains 118 tables.
Can you find the data you imported earlier ?
Yes the data we have imported earlier can be found at the end of the Contact.csv file. But we can see that they have been integrated in the Saleforce's contact data model.
Compare the data schema with the official data model. Do the fields in the table Lead correspond to the fields of the entity Lead in the schema?
We can find the official data model of all the tables on this link : https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api.meta/api/sforce_api_objects_lead.htm
We can see that the fields of the official data model for the lead table correspond exactly to the fields contained in the exported Lead.csv file. It means that the data exported correspond to the tables of Salesforce's data model.
Task 5: Assess update control capabilities
Aime of the task
The aime of this task was to discover how to have somme control on Salesforce's updates. Here we can see some critical updates:
What part of the application is affected by the updates ?
It is mostly the security part of the application that is affected by thoes updates. Some of them modify the behavior of the programm so the administrator has to ensure that they won't lead to any trouble before to active them.
Lightning Experience User Interface
Salesforce Classic User Interface
Conclusion
To conclude this lab alowed us to see what are the adventages of a SaaS solution with its features and its customization features but it also warn us on some of its disadvantages like the danger of the vendor lock-in and the dependency to vendor upgrade.