Guest: Adam Gross - Salesforce.com
Host: Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow

Adam Gross - Salesforce.com
My name is Adam Gross, I run our Developer Programs here at Salesforce.com and we are here in San Francisco at our Annual Dreamforce User and Developer Conference, we've got about 5,000 people from around the world assembled to learn what's new at Salesforce.com and check out our new Apex Language and Platform. So, I thought I give a short demo of some of those new things as well as some of other capabilities in our platform developers, and to do that, I'm just going to ahead in my web browser here and login to a development version of Salesforce.com. When I login you'll see the actual Salesforce.com UI and just a set of forms and modules organized by these different tabs here, I'm so pretty straight forward and of course, I can just click on in this case a 'Contacts' tab and I'll go ahead and look at one of my particular contacts, and here I can see essentially a form, a set of information about this particular contact and you can see that I've got things like their birthday, their title and their phone number, I've got information that's related to them like, the cases or support incidents they've filed, my activities history, pretty basic CRM capabilities.

One of the key things that we introduced in the platform a while ago, is the ability to customize what the application stores and actually be able to modify the data model, which you can imagine is pretty useful in both making CRM unique for particular business as well as extending beyond CRM into other kinds of applications. So, I'll show you what the developer experience for that looks like by going ahead -- going into the setup area, and this is kind of developer area of the product and I'm still within my web browser and I'll go ahead and go into the 'Contacts' area and I'll go into 'Fields,' and you can see, just like I have in a database table, I've got a set of fields, I have to fine this contact and I've also got a set of custom fields, fields that I've added myself and I'll go ahead and click 'New' to create a new field and you can see I've got a set of data types again just like I have in a database and I'll a grab picklist and I'll go ahead in here and I'm going to create a new picklist called Computer Preference and of course, this can be something like Mac or PC or Linux and I'll click 'Next,' I can see a bunch of Security Options and next again I'll just save and in real time now, when I go back to the contacts tab into that contact we were looking at, you can see that I've got a new field automatically added to the system and I click 'Edit' of course and go ahead and change whatever that values is.

So, using a metadata model, we've actually changed the data model of the application. We've now customized it to capture whatever kind of information we're interested in, and you can see how in this case, Salesforce is acting not just as a way of capturing information for my Salesforce, but they can be extended to really capture any kind of information, take it otherwise put in the database. Now, one of the capabilities we've introduced in the past is something called AppExchange and the ability to run multiple applications within a single version of Salesforce, and here when I switch, I can see all the different applications I've got to installed and in this case, I've got Warehouse Management Application, example of something very different than traditional CRM and beyond just creating new fields in this case, I created entire new tabs. So, now just to creating a entire new database table and what other things you can see we can do here is bring services from across the Internet into Salesforce and integrate them and create mashups, in this case, I've got a Warehouse Management Application, I can click on warehouse and assuming it's going to show me what the status is, the inventory level is for the different capabilities in this warehouse.

Now, one of things that we've added and announced this week is our new Apex language and what that let's me do is, not just create my own data models and be able to capture my own information, but actually be able to manipulate the behavior of the application by creating code that's literally going to run on our service on demand. So, I'll click 'New' here to show an example of this and what we're going to do is, go ahead and create an order for this hypothetical warehouse an Inventory Management System. When I'm going to go ahead and grab quality and we'll ahead and grab some flat screen TVs and you can see that these fields, the warehouse and the order status are blank. I'll click 'Save' and what's happening on the backend here, is not only as that data being saved to database again on demand on our service, but we're running some new Apex code that's going to automatically see which warehouse is closest, see if it has the inventory available and actually update the order status and of course, that's precisely, what I've done here, and I'll go into the warehouse status map again, you can see it's actually plodding location owns that order and it's gone ahead and updated the quantity of these flat-screen TVs to reflect the order that we've just placed.

Now, from a developer, there is another view of this Apex code, you can actually even go into the clips and take a look at literally what that code looks like to accomplish something like that, you'll see that if you've ever seen Java to very, very similar, it's really a subset of Java's capabilities with the addition of some new syntax for issuing queries, something that we call our Object Query Language once we manipulate the data problematically here. And what's different though is when I hit 'Save' to actually compile this piece of code, it's not compiling locally on this computer, it's actually sending the code up to Salesforce and it's going to be compiling on the service. So, a very, very brief introduction to some of the capabilities that are available in the new release of our platform in our application and if you go to developer.salesforce.com, you can get a free developer edition, you can try all that up yourself. Take a look at some of the sample code and documentation and join the community as well.