Simonds - Discussion on Almost Anything

Back in the summer of 2008 I was on vacation in Colorado Springs visiting my natural mother. I received a call from my senior manager. He told me that I was needed in California for a meeting with our senior executives and about 5 senior vice presidents from Salesforce.com. This meeting was more of a dog and pony show. Salesforce was trying to sell us more packages and how we, as a company, could benefit from moving more of our legacy systems into the Salesforce Cloud / Platform. At first I did not understand why I was along for the ride, but the time came when everyone asked me my opinion. Everyone that is associated with me knows that I am not afraid to speak my mind.

I expressed my doubts and concerns, some that could not be answered by the senior VP’s from Salesforce. I stated that moving all our applications and processes into the cloud or on their platform really ties our company, Maxim Integrated Products, to the Salesforce platform. I asked the question, what if we were to move out of the cloud, what would we do then? If you develop all your applications within their platform, what do you do if your company decides to move to another solution? Let us not forget that Salesforce licenses are not cheap. If you have a lot of users, the yearly fee can be quite large.

Now that is how I felt until about 6 months ago because we were able to accomplish all our integrations with Salesforce using their API and PHP. My thought process changed though when I was given the specifications on a new integration for our worldwide sales team. After reviewing the requirements, I could not think of any other way to build the process without using APEX. So I started to dig in and learn the Salesforce platform language, APEX, triggers and classes.

This past November, I attended the Salesforce Dream Force conference in San Francisco. This is the third year in a row that I have attended it. I spent most of my free time in the developer’s lounge. I attended different APEX development tracks and learned a ton. The power of APEX is amazing and Salesforce has built an outstanding interface that allows for development on the fly.

I am a complete newbie when it comes to APEX, classes and trigger, but I am learning the fundamentals quite fast. I attend to share my experiences here on the new site. I will use the blog, forums, and CMS to promote what I have learned. I will also start some forums for APEX and will try to help anyone that I can, but please understand that I am new to this and that I have a large learning curve.

Thanks

~Mike