Salesforce Platform Reviews

We use the mobile application, the Lightning application. We use it with consulting and integrating the different products like vCloud or integration with Google. There are some that we do production also. Everything is on mobile now. So we use mobile apps and then we develop those applications. It's a Cloud browser and device support that we are doing the programming. So basically now we are developing that in the Lightning Application, where we can. That is based on the event architecture and by the company's controller, we write those according to that. We develop the programming that will go to the software, we need to have the APEX programming materials for the IBM system, or with Lightning RAWC, who with integration we need to go with other configuration tools. So there are a lot of things that need to be captured in developing the project.

They also have features they are integrating to the other services or managing the technical management or you can go with the integration point of view and you can able to, in the build tool, do the configuring of those things in terms of other approvals or like customization. And you can include the time bond overflows for the emails. So all these parts come from the Salesforce only. So Appian does not have it, it comes with that only and now we are able to do it.

If you compare it with Appian, there are business rules that you are dealing with. With less code, we are making a higher standard. So maybe, in the future, Salesforce can make it a more integral part of the application. And they are also strategic partners with multiple companies, so maybe that is the reason they are sustainable and they the four versions every year. These things likely depend upon robotics programming and they use the latest technologies for a more stable portal. So we need to be more cautious about the coding and so data file would be more stable. But as a partner, there will be some time-taking process to make it up in the implementation. When you compare with Appian, they have to improve more on configuration and more systematic care, configuring by itself and if they are making other things in the area that they update. 

The process should be automatically approved. They should also configure the maps that we initial use. I think the alerts can be used differently, or customize the targeted content mills can also be automated. Those things can also be included in Salesforce. I was looking at this map that needs to be included. Like a world map. An easy way of getting those details and then adding to it and then being able to do it in a more simplified way, visually.

I have used Salesforce App Cloud for two years.

Stability is more than adequate. It takes a number of developers to handle that currently. Most of the people don't know that a lot of features are developed with rules. Unless you are a developer you won't be able to design it currently. So it's easy to do a mini-platform now with Salesforce. That may be the strategy, but if it is having combined information within one platform, it is stable.

At first, the setup can be difficult. But once we get it deployed and get our tools implemented it is more automated. We have now set up a solution that allows us to easily deploy quickly. So once you understand the coding program, then it was easier for them to deploy. It usually takes about a month to deploy.

I would rate the Salesforce Cloud App at an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for customer invoicing. We also use it for telling the customers about the regional upgrades and patches that we're rolling out.

I'm not sure what the most valuable aspect of the solution is, but I can say that their finance and auditing systems are quite impressive. You can audit in different invoices right to procurement. It's all quite seamless. 

The user interface is very good.

I haven't used that much of the solution, so I can't speak to what would need improvement. For me, for now, I'd say it works pretty seamlessly.

There have been some minor issues here and there, but they've gotten them under control.

The solution offers upgrades at a slower pace. The solution needs to keep up with competitors.

I've been using the solution for nearly nine months.

The solution is quite stable. I haven't faced any issues in relation to the stability of the product.

The scalability is very nice once the solution has been implemented.

Currently, we use our own services for technical support. If a team member from our support needs to contact them, they do.

Our central ID services team handled the implementation of the solution. They'd be better able to discuss what the implementation was like. However, it's my understanding that it was pretty straightforward. I'm not sure how many people were involved in the deployment process.

In terms of maintenance, there's an ICT team that handles not just this tool but several tools for us. I'm not sure how many engineers on that team are dedicated to Salesforce.

The pricing of the solution is fine. The enterprise purchase was for our entire organization.

We're partners with Salesforce.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're currently using.

We're a sizeable company and have 3,000-4,000 people using the solution currently.

We're moving towards a different cloud due to a corporate mandate we'd like to have the opportunity to implement it there.

There's a lot of training that needs to be done to get used to the solution and to get to understand all of the features on offer. To tackle this, we have asked the task force training candidate members to get everyone trained. Getting a good handle on the solution is very important.

Before Salesforce, we used to use four to five disparate systems to manage all the customers. With Salesforce, we have been given one central source of tools. There are several departments that used to target customers separately and each of them was using their own systems for tracking. Now, with this one tool, there's only one type of invoice. It's streamlined everything in terms of billing and customer outreach.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Our primary use case for Salesforce App Cloud is to make assertions that I personalize, based on the information that the companies have in their systems. 

I would like to see an improvement in the price - it could be cheaper. Also, I would like to have more integration with Google.

I have been using Salesforce App Cloud for three to four years now.

We haven't had any issues with stability so far.

I believe Salesforce App Cloud is a scalable solution.

The technical support is very good and they respond very fast.

The initial setup is really straightforward. You can deploy it yourself, or you can make use of a consultant.

I would recommend this solution to others and I will recommend that they use all the other SalesForce products. If their primary business use case is covered by Salesforce App Cloud, they should start there. If they have other business cases, they should definitely use other Salesforce products to see if that is covered.

Additional features that I would like to see included in the next release is more integration with Google. On a scale of one to ten, I will rate this solution a nine. 

We use this solution for the support of business sales and service processes.

It has allowed the company to focus on Business and not in Technology.

The most valuable features are quick customization, solid deployment processes, and excellent reliability.

The cost of data storage is an issue once the company grows. The last time I checked a Gigabyte of structured data (tables) cost 3000 usd per month.

Very stable.

With decent developers (governor-limits in Salesforce can be quite a challenge for newbies) Salesforce scales easily.

All problems solve within a reasonable timeframe. Best support comes from the community which is great.

Used Zoho CRM and also tested others. The flexibility and ecosystem for Salesforce is unmatched. 

The learning curve for the initial setup can be difficult if you don't have professional help. Once the basics are learned getting things done is mostly a problem of process.

In house

Less than a year

Carefully study the user licencing possibilites and make adequate choices based on real needs (must have vs nice-to-have).

Marketing and Sales Lead, Forecasting, Campaign management.

We have different sets of businesses: B2B and B2C. So depending on business users and requirement, we were dealing with their requirements of creating leads, managing forecasting and all. So Salesforce has helped us customising the system as per business user needs.

Areas of improvement can be around Engagement of Customers feature and approvals of transactional records.

Two years

There was no Issues in deployment because we haven't customised Salesforce much for our users. Instead, we focused on using standard Salesforce and integrating it with Netsuite.

No issues with stability.

We didn't encourage scalability because we were had Netsuite, which we already customized so much. So, we decided to keep Salesforce simple enough to just store customer data and help capturing forecasting.

A three out of 10.

A two out of 10.

No. We just decided to use Salesforce as a CRM system as its Forecasting and Marketing Lead is a good module to work with.

We used standard Salesforce, so setup wasn't complex.

We implemented through an in-house team

Pricing and license differ and depend on how much license you are purchasing from them.

We didn't evaluated any system at that time. But after Salesforce got implemented, we tried evaluating other systems as well

Scalability to configure and integrate. This is due to Salesforce being easily configurable and, with the ability to build APIs, almost anything can be integrated, thus allowing more capability, more data and more value to the system.

Improved forecasting, account management, and a 360 view of customer.

Easier process to move to Lightning Components. There is a huge overtake of planning, testing and resources required to analyse what features would work. Currently, not all configurations and development can simply move across from Classic to Lightning. In an ideal world, this would be a lot less exhaustive.

Eight years.

No issues.

No issues.

No issues.

Six out of 10.

Straightforward for the most part. Can be complex with API integrations and coding.

Costly, but it is the top product in SaaS/PaaS. Pricing is more for large to enterprise level companies. If integration or development is not required, I'd recommend a cheaper CRM product.

Yes, we considered building in-house, Sage CRM, Oracle CRM.

Define your business processes. Consider customer experience first and then the User experience before thinking about data and financial related benefits.

The two important standout features are:

• Firstly, most of the apps allow you to try out the product before buying it. The trial period depends on the product and varies from a week to 30 days.
• Secondly, people are encouraged to review the products and this allows the potential purchasers to see feedback from both happy/unhappy customers. I would also like to add that approximately 50% of the apps on the exchange are available for free.

Salesforce encourages independent app development and what this simply does is, it extends the Salesforce functionality. Unique verticals and unique needs from Salesforce are extremely well-catered for and this allows users to avoid writing some custom codes.

I think the search needs to be improved so as to allow for a broader keyword search.

I find that the search facility on the AppExchange does not always allow for keyword searching.If I type in the word Form, it will not necessarily bring up all the apps on the exchange that can be used for form processing.If you know the name of the app you are looking for or its publisher then it works well.

I have been using this solution for a little over eight years.

There were no issues with the platform itself. However, some individual apps do have a few stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

I have never needed technical support from the App Cloud team, but my experience with the broader Salesforce technical support team has been outstanding.

There are no alternates to the App Cloud but some vendors list their products privately.

Most of the apps are pretty straightforward to install. The more complex the app, it usually entails a more complex installation process. This is true when the triggers are involved for the Salesforce sites and sometimes, for the Visualforce pages.

Always try each app before buying it and also, determine the quality of support provided.

The App Cloud is not a single product, but rather a multitude of the Salesforce compatible apps, also known as the AppExchange. It is very similar to the App Store or Google Play.

I find that the search facility on the AppExchange does not always allow for keyword searching.If I type in the word Form, it will not necessarily bring up all the apps on the exchange that can be used for form processing.If you know the name of the app you are looking for or its publisher then it works well.

Fast speed to delivery of new solutions; fits Agile development model; easy integration and mashup with other SaaS/PaaS offerings; combination of configuration and coding; easy to learn and get up-to-speed quickly for developers; no waiting for hardware & other environments to be ready; scales up immediately

We went from 1 or 2 CRM enhancement releases per year to a minimum of 8 per year by moving from on premise CRM to cloud CRM. Automation of process steps have saved us millions of dollars by removing manual steps/activities. We have reduced our average speed to respond to customers by >4000% through automated routing/workflow. Most importantly, our users actually love the system (how many times have you heard that?).

We have also built custom applications on the platform for such things as faculty attendance tracking, HR compensation review and exception processing, and text based poling for use in meetings or classroom settings. These were all relatively small applications that never seemed to be "big enough" or "prioritized enough" to get IT resource dedication. However, with the ease of the salesforce platform, IT was able to quickly and cheaply build these applications. Without such a flexible and easy to configure/code platform, I'm not sure these would have gotten attention.

Hard to negotiate ability to scale down; integrations with back-office systems is still complex unless you have robust SOA platform already in place at your organization; doesn't fit for heavy graphics or multimedia apps; could benefit from other than per-user pricing; reporting tools are not great and you usually have to use a 3rd party reporting tool for any complex report or reports which also need to source data from outside your CRM (which many of ours do), and to get any historical data analysis (e.g. need data warehouse).

Managing test and dev environments is certainly easier than on-premise, but there still are challenges synching changes between environments and synching data. Additionally you will have to negotiate for multiple "full data" environments if you have multiple parallel path releases going since salesforce usually only gives you one of these environments.

Since 2009

We did with reporting. We did not sufficiently test our reporting tools, built with a combination of salesforce and cognos reporting, and there were too many discrepancies in the numbers being reported such that we had to immediately put a tiger team together to address. This had nothing to do with the platform, and more to do with our process for adequately testing large scale reporting before rolling out to 4,000 people.

Having said that, the reporting tools are still just ok. We usually end up extracting data out of salesforce to report on elsewhere, primarily because it's easier to extract salesforce data and merge with data from other systems as opposed to putting data from other systems into salesforce just for reporting. The good news is each year the reporting/analytic platform gets bettter.

Nope, it's been more stable than any on premise software we've ever had.

We did have issues when we originally launched, due to us exceeding certain API thresholds that exist by default by salesforce.com. The good news is they were able to increase them for us relatively quickly.

Solid. No issues. They really try and work with you to ensure you know how/where/why you are using or not using all aspects of the platform. No, of course, they do this level of reporting to you so that you use more, but it's still good data to inform where you have opportunity to better leverage what you are already paying for.

Very good. As usual, if you run into anything serious, escalate quickly. They have channels for escalating, so use them. Don't let your technical teams try to solve themselves for too long.

We previously used Oracle CRM on premise. We switched because we spent too much time applying patches and upgrades and regression testing such that we were unable to respond to changing business conditions and put in enhancements. Now we never deal with patches and upgrades and we only focus on enhancements.

Much of it was straightforward, with the only complex areas being areas that we wanted to customize for items like inquiry routing (our rules were very complex) and analyzing how we wanted to configure the data best to allow us to also report they way we wanted to for operations, executive and historical comparison reporting. Thinking those concepts through was difficult and I'd suggest spending more time on those activities than anything else during design, and test your design concepts early so you can adjust if it turns out your assumptions don't work out the way you thought they would when you see real data being put through the system.

We used Appirio as our implementation vendor. They did a solid job. As usual, with consulting, it's the strength of the team they field for you, so that is what you should evaluate the most.

We have a case study on our implementation on salesforce.com website that you can read, under DeVry.

Negotiate HARD on ability to reduce licenses if business conditions dictate you have to shrink or divest yourself of divisions/departments. They won't want to do this, but that should not stop you for negotiating what's right for your business.

If you desire, you can get them to agree to create custom types of licenses that are specific to the way you plan to use the platform or the tools (sfa, crm, marketing), so this might be worth exploring if you have unique business requirements that don't fit the standard pricing model.

Yes, we also looked at RightNow Technologies, which was later bought by Oracle. We actually used RightNow and Oracle CRM, so we had experience with both.

The hardest part of using the system is finding the technical resources to do the customization and configuration. I'd recommend getting going with a good contracting firm, but make sure you interview and lock in the resources. After that, I'd recommend you find internal business people who know your processes and happen to have a technical aptitude and get them trained up to be admins and developers. We did that and it worked out great...but be prepared to give them significant raises, promotions, and/or long term incentives to keep them with your company.