Salesforce Development Vs. Traditional Development

The competitive nature of present living standards has always kept every individual in the race for success. The urge to grab the crown and be the Numero Uno is inevitable, may it be a gamer trying hard to be the first one to grab the crown on the Fall Mountain or a company striving to stay on top of their business. And, as we can vouch, customer expectations, user experience, and platform feasibility play an important role in that. For a company to gain new customers while retaining current customers, the relationship should be bidirectional. This raises the necessity for a good Customer Relationship Management Platform or more commonly known as a CRM. 

Naturally, when the term CRM comes up, almost everyone thinks of  Salesforce. Presently, the CRM giant is mature enough to be used for any sort of customer-related tasks put forward by various companies. 

Since the dawn of salesforce, it has been emphasizing a lot upon its native development tools to make the work of CRM Platform Developers easy. Lightning Components and other tools like VisualForce and Apex, when combined can do wonders for a developer. Trust me, it makes the job much easier with its predefined features.

While the traditional development tools which are readily available seem to be the bread and butter of all sorts of development, the tools provided by the Salesforce development platform has its own benefits, especially when the development is more CRM related. 

Some points which make Salesforce better CRM:

A Near-Saturated Development Method for CRM Platforms: 

Salesforce CRM Development saves a lot of time and skill. Because, it takes care of all of the pre-production activities such as setup and installation of hardware and complex software, setting up user access at different levels, providing proper reports and analytics. Additionally, it ensures the best security and is super mobile-friendly.

In the case of Salesforce, it saves resources if a proper picture of the model is painted to the developer and the output of salesforce is an inter-connected desktop and mobile platform for the users synced in the smoothest way possible. 

Feasibility in Learning:

While other platforms provide all sorts of developer documents for the developer to learn about the platform; it might be ambiguous to a lot of beginners. Salesforce, on the other hand, provides a platform ( Trailhead ) of its own which is open to all. Interested one can use this platform to master the use of the entire platform for building and managing CRM apps along with their developer documents.

Imperative Learning Vs. Declarative Coding:

The fact that the entire process is “Click not Code” turns a lot of heads as it brings with it a lot of affable development methods. With this Declarative type of programming, we get a lot of benefits like;

No need to hire a specialist coder or software developer:

It blots out the need for spending useful resources as you can just click and code yourself. No need to hire another professional. If you are running a business, you may not have the time to learn a new programming language. This problem can also be solved by the drag and drop solution.

Declarative programming provides a much quicker turnaround time:

Improving the speed of development cycles is a critical or high priority for all types of development. A drag-and-drop method can stagily decrease this turnaround, as most of the essential code is prewritten. A declarative programming platform will allow the project to be developed much quicker than if the code had to be written on our own.

It is simple and easy to customize your project:

As the entire process is Declarative instead of Imperative, customization of the project according to the user requirements becomes an ingredient picking process. All sorts of settings are already present in the pre-defined development modules. And, the developer just has to select the appropriate configuration and the platform does the rest in seconds. However, one may not have quite the level of customization as they would with imperative programming. And, most platforms still give the same benefits that would usually require an entire department of IT. It also provides room for easy and efficient error correction as the process is very much similar to the “Click not Code” method.

All of these solutions allow for Scalability.

Declarative platforms are often simpler and safer, so they are easier to maintain and grow as needed. One such platform is the Salesforce Lightning Platform. The Lightning Platform empowers business owners with all of the tools of a developer, without requiring an advanced skill set. This also helps companies who wish to do a better job in their customer relationship management. 

Button Click Administration:

The advantage of ButtonClick Admin is that you don’t have to lean on an IT team to collect, modify or gather information. At the click of a button, one can manage the team and data without any outside support. Also, a fully customized solution can be opened five times faster using Salesforce’s ButtonClick when compared with other development technologies.

Perfection is something that everyone struggles to achieve, same is the case with the Salesforce Development Platform. Even after all its noteworthy benefits, it cannot be called as the Perfect Development Platform, this is why;

Setbacks Of Salesforce:

Ample Customizations’ Evil Doppelganger:

With the numerous amount of customizations available in the developer platform, it is very easy to break the reasonable barrier. This may prove to be a very complex solution to the users. In terms of development, Developers may either miss some features or they may over-do it.

Limited Deployment Options:

Salesforce corrivals, such as Oracle CRM, Microsoft Dynamics 365,  SAP CRM etc. provide several deployment options such as on-premises, cloud, or hybrid solutions. They also hand different cloud deployment models, like a private cloud, public cloud, or hybrid cloud. While Cloud Deployment and Public Cloud Deployment Model are the only guns in Salesforce’s Arsenal. 

Being a UX Engineer at Divami, I often come across discussions and arguments regarding the use of the Salesforce Development Platform over the traditional ones. I think that the development process in Salesforce has some shortcomings when the scope of development changes from only Customer Relationship Management to a web-based app or an entire platform. But, Salesforce development definitely stands unparalleled in the Customer Relationship Management Space. Definitely, it has saved me a lot of time as we don’t have to write similar code repetitively. With its matured and continuously developing tools like Lightning Components, VisualForce, and Apex, Salesforce has an edge over other Customer Relationship Management Development Platforms.