Salesforce Certified Platform Developer 1

Lesson 1: Getting Started with Salesforce Platform

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 What's in It for Me

Understand Salesforce and its use cases

List the Salesforce terminology

Understand the Salesforce Architecture

Use Salesforce Metadata and API

Compare Declarative and Programmatic

changes
List the tools available for Application
Development
Use AppExchange as a part of your Application
Development Strategy

Navigate to Salesforce Documentation

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 Understanding Salesforce Platform
Salesforce Platform and its use cases

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 Getting Buried under Piles of Customer Data?

United Containers sells office supplies. When their

business representatives interact with customers,
they capture customer data—phone numbers,
emails, home addresses, preferences, and items.
Following were the challenges faced while
handling data:
• There were multiple sources and formats of
data
• These data from multiple locations were stored
in multiple systems
• As these data were situated in multiple
locations, accessing them quickly when required
was not possible
• Data was also not readily available for analysis

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 Customer Relationship Management

Customer Relationship Management or CRM is an approach in which companies interact with their
customers, current and potential. CRM analyzes customer data relevant to the company.

SALES SERVICE

CRM

QUALITY SUPPORT

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 Introduction to Salesforce

Salesforce is a web-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool that allows users to log in from
anywhere with an Internet connection and a browser. Salesforce CRM allows you to:

Store customer
information

Build an effective
Communicate effectively
communication path
with your customers and
between customer and
employees
business

Keep employees and

Market the business customers engaged and
help them collaborate

Help businesses acquire

more customers

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 Case study—Scenario

Scenario Solution

A team of 20 sales representatives contacts various customers and records their interaction details in an Excel
sheet. The difficulties faced while recording data in Excel are:
• Data is populated horizontally in an Excel sheet. As the number of columns increase, it becomes bulky and
difficult to fill the data.
• There is no overview of what each column contains, therefore you need to slide through all the columns for
details on a particular customer.
• As 20 sales representatives fill out data simultaneously, syncing these Excel sheets into a master sheet
becomes a daunting task.
• If a formula or a dropdown in the Excel sheet is updated, sales representatives will have to re-distribute it and
re-sync the data.

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 Case study—Solution

Scenario Solution

Salesforce is a highly customizable platform and can be changed and modified to create scalable and connected
applications to help you become a customer-centric company. With an in-built “standard functionality”, Salesforce
can cover most of the business functions.
Salesforce helped the customer service executive in the following ways:
• They could see all the fields on a record, in a descending order. It becomes easy to fill data in the fields.
• They could just scroll up and down to see each column contents.
• They didn’t need to sync. Salesforce maintains the data on cloud and this real-time data is available to
everyone as soon as the data is saved.

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 Salesforce Platform—Use Cases

Salesforce allows you to design various business-specific applications for many departments within an organization.

Supply Chain
Contracts, logistics,
transportations, and
vendor management IT Help Desk / Self-Service
Community
Cross sell Legacy Apps Consolidation
Upsell Enterprise Knowledge
Reaching to Customers Identity Management
Customer Information Custom Web / Mobile Apps

Platform
Campaign Analytics Finance Department
Tracking Campaigns Budget, Contract,
Email Marketing Pricing, Billing, and
Running campaigns Audit Management

HR Department Operations Department

Employee Intranet Asset & Facilities Management
Recruiting & Onboarding Financial Shared Services
Performance & Coaching M&A Enablement

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 Standard Functionalities in Salesforce

All the requirements in a CRM are present in Salesforce and it can be customized to suit individual
requirements.

You need to be able to: Salesforce offers the following standard functionalities:

Sell to prospects and customers Leads and Opportunities to manage the sales process

Help customers after the sale Cases and Communities to engage with customers

Work on the go Salesforce1 Mobile app to power your mobile strategy

Collaborate Chatter and Communities for employees, customers, and partners

Market to your audience ExactTarget Marketing Cloud to manage your Customer’s journey

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 Extending Standard Functionality in Salesforce

In situations where Standard functionality can’t handle use cases, you can design suitable applications on the
Salesforce Platform. Once designed, they automatically become scalable and will be connected always.

You need to be able to: Salesforce offers the following standard functionalities:

Manage internal project requests Custom objects for managing projects

Add custom fields to capture important data Custom fields for standard and custom objects

Set up automatic email alerts Processes with email alert actions

Lightning Components and Lightning App Builder for creating an

Build a custom internal app
employee app

Build a custom customer-facing app Heroku for creating a customer-facing app

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 Understanding Salesforce Terminologies
List the commonly used Salesforce terminologies

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 Salesforce Terminologies

Term Definition

Record An item you are tracking in the database. If data is like a spreadsheet, record is a row
on the spreadsheet.

Field A place where you store a value, such as a name or an address. Using the spreadsheet
example, a field would be a column on the spreadsheet.

Object A table in the database. In the spreadsheet example, an object is a tab on the
spreadsheet.

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 Salesforce Terminologies (contd.)

Term Definition

An abbreviated term for “organization.” All your data, configuration, and customization is
Org
located here and a user can log in to it. It is also called “your instance of Salesforce.”

A suite of configuration tools and programming languages and APIs native to Salesforce
Force.com
including Apex and Visualforce. This is used to customize Salesforce per your needs.

App A set of fields, objects, permissions, and functionality to support a business process.

Tab Just like a tab in spreadsheet, tabs give access to objects in Salesforce UI

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 Salesforce and Common Excel Spreadsheet

App

Records Tabs Field Object Org

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 Multitenancy and Cloud
Understanding the multitenant environment

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 Multitenancy and Cloud in Salesforce

Shared resources for

power, water, and Your dedicated
building maintenance space

Multitenancy is the fundamental technology that clouds use to share IT resources cost-efficiently and securely.

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 Advantages of Multitenancy

A ll customer are on the same

code base and can avail the
K eep tenant-specific or
organization-specific data
same benefits secure in a shared database

S ince all setup is on the same

code base, if there is any
E nsures that the system’s
response time scales as
upgrade, it is distributed to thousands of tenants use
all the Salesforce orgs the service

T he Salesforce platform
combines several persistence
S alesforce supports
thousands of organizations
technologies without any need and their deployed apps on
for virtualization its cloud

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 Knowledge Check

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 KNOWLEDGE
CHECK
What will you use to capture an email address on a custom object?

a. Record

b. App

c. Custom object

d. Field

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 KNOWLEDGE
CHECK
What will you use to capture an email address on a custom object?

a. Record

b. App

c. Custom object

d. Field

The correct answer is d.

To capture an email address on a custom object, create a new custom field on the object.

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 Understanding Salesforce Metadata and API
Look at Salesforce Metadata and API

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 What is Metadata

Metadata is data about data. Salesforce uses a runtime engine that creates all application data from
metadata at the runtime.

Runtime engine

Tenant-specific metadata

Common metadata

data

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 Salesforce Metadata and Optimizations

Internally, Salesforce uses the database tables MT_Objects and MT_Fields to store the metadata. Salesforce
uses the table MT_Data to store the application-accessible data that maps to all organization-specific tables
and their fields.

Multitenant Multitenant Multitenant

Metadata data indexes

MT_Table MT_Data
s
MT_Indexes
MT_Unique_indexex
MT_Relationship
MT_Name_Demorm

MT_Clobs MT_Fallback_indexex
MT_Fields

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 Application Programming Interface

Salesforce platform provides open, standards-based APIs that developers can use to build apps.
Application Programming Interface or API is a contract between two software systems through which they
exchange information. A simple example of API is the series of ports at the side of your laptop. When you
plug in your headphone, you start receiving the audio, even though the headphone or the audio jack is not
“aware” of their individual functionality. This is a form of hardware API and similar scenarios can be found
in software.

OUT IN

Software API
Hardware API

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 Understanding Salesforce Architecture
Understand how Salesforce is built

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 Understanding Salesforce Architecture

The different levels of Salesforce Architecture are:

Complete
CRM

Sales services Marketing Community Analytics Apps

Largest Enterprise Ecosystem

A P
2, 700+ partner Apps

Data &
Mobile UI

I
Object Collaboration Analytics

s
Fast App Dev &
Identity Workflow
Customization

Trusted Multitenant Cloud

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 Declarative vs. Programmatic Changes and Customizations
Compare Configuration and Customization

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 Declarative vs. Programmatic Changes

Broadly, the changes done in Salesforce can be classified into the following two categories:

Declarative Programmatic

Referred to as Customization in
Referred to as Configuration in Salesforce
Salesforce

Faster than coding Greater flexibility and complex logic

Difficult, but more control over what is

Easier to create and maintain
being done

No coding skills required High learning curve, coding skills required

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 Scenario for Declarative and Programmatic Changes

DECLARATIVE PROGRAMMATIC

• Applications
• Force.com Pages
• Tabs Finish Order
• Sites
• Page Layouts
• Lightning Components
• Record Types User Interface
Delivery

• Workflows • Force.com Page Controller

• Validation Rules Business Logic • Force.com Code
• Assignment Rules • Web Services API
Finish Order

• Objects Data Model • Web Services API

• Fields • Metadata
Delivery
API
• Relationships

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 Application Development Tools in Salesforce
List the tools available for Application Development in Salesforce

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 Three Salesforce Application Development Tools

Force.com IDE for Eclipse

Setup Menu 1 3 Developer Console

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 Setup Menu

The Setup Menu is a part of the Salesforce User Interface and is visible only to System Administrators or
Users with “View Setup and Configuration” permission on their profiles.
1

2 3

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 Demo 1—Navigation through Setup Menu
Demonstrate how to navigate the setup menu

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 Developer Console

Developer console is an online Integrated Development Environment or IDE that can be accessed directly
within the browser from Salesforce setup.

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 Demo 2—Access Developer Console
Demonstrate how to access the developer console

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 Force.com IDE Plugin for Eclipse

Force.com IDE is one of the favorite tools of the most advanced developers. This tool is available as a plugin
for Eclipse.

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 AppExchange as Application Development Strategy
How to use AppExchange as part of your Application Development Strategy

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 AppExchange Strategy

AppExchange is the App Store of the Enterprise world. There are thousands of applications on AppExchange
to solve any Business Case.

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 Demo 3—Navigating AppExchange
Demonstrate how to navigate the AppExchange

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 Finding and Navigating Salesforce Documentation
Discuss Salesforce Documentation

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 Salesforce Help and Documentation

Salesforce has an award winning documentation, which is available online. You can learn and reference all the
Salesforce features through this documentation. There is also a large community of Salesforce customers,
developers, and partners who are ready to help anyone inclined to learn Salesforce.

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 Salesforce Help and Documentation (contd.)

Salesforce has made it quick and easy for you to get help whenever you face issues.

Contextual Help for

this page

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 Demo 4—Access and Navigate Salesforce Documentation
Demonstrate how to access and navigate Salesforce documentation

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 Understanding Salesforce Trust
Understand different aspects of Salesforce Trust

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 Salesforce Trust

Salesforce treats the security of data and the up time of Salesforce applications as a priority.

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 Quiz

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 QUIZ
Salesforce is a system that has which of the following attributes?
1

a. Highly scalable, suitable for only certain type of applications

b. Multitenant, needs to be upgraded manually every couple of months

c. Requires a lot of maintenance

d. Highly scalable and automatically upgraded

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 QUIZ
Salesforce is a system that has which of the following attributes?
1

a. Highly scalable, suitable for only certain type of applications

b. Multitenant, needs to be upgraded manually every couple of months

c. Requires a lot of maintenance

d. Highly scalable and automatically upgraded

The correct answer is d.

Salesforce is highly scalable and automatically upgraded.

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 QUIZ
To fulfill a requirement, one should adopt which of the following the strategy?
2

a. Go for the most flexible and customized solution

b. See if any Apex Triggers or Classes can fulfill that requirement

c. Waiting for the next upgrade to the system

d. Check if it can be fulfilled with configuration first, else go for customization

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 QUIZ
To fulfill a requirement, one should adopt which of the following the strategy?
2

a. Go for the most flexible and customized solution

b. See if any Apex Triggers or Classes can fulfill that requirement

c. Waiting for the next upgrade to the system

d. Check if it can be fulfilled with configuration first, else go for customization

The correct answer is d.

To fulfill a requirement, check if it can be fulfilled with configuration first, otherwise adopt customization.

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 QUIZ
Which of the following is the expansion of CRM?
3

a. Customer Relationship Management

b. Customer Requirements Maintenance

c. Customer Request Management

d. Customer Relations Manager

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 QUIZ
Which of the following is the expansion of CRM?
3

a. Customer Relationship Management

b. Customer Requirements Maintenance

c. Customer Request Management

d. Customer Relations Manager

The correct answer is a.

Customer Relationship Management is abbreviated as CRM.

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 QUIZ
Why should you choose Salesforce as the system?
4

a. Can be installed quickly on a lot of computers

b. Salesforce metadata can be installed on any computer

c. Salesforce is highly customizable, quickly configured, no maintenance required

d. Can extend the applications on your computer

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 QUIZ
Why should you choose Salesforce as the system?
4

a. Can be installed quickly on a lot of computers

b. Salesforce metadata can be installed on any computer

c. Salesforce is highly customizable, quickly configured, no maintenance required

d. Can extend the applications on your computer

The correct answer is c.

Salesforce is highly customizable, quickly configured, no maintenance required.

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 QUIZ
What is AppExchange?
5

a. A marketplace where apps can be exchanged between anyone

b. A marketplace where you can sell you applications developed in any language

c. You can only buy applications for Salesforce

d. A marketplace which has a lot of free and paid applications for only Salesforce

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 QUIZ
What is AppExchange?
5

a. A marketplace where apps can be exchanged between anyone

b. A marketplace where you can sell you applications developed in any language

c. You can only buy applications for Salesforce

d. A marketplace which has a lot of free and paid applications for only Salesforce

The correct answer is d.

AppExchange is a marketplace which has many free and paid applications only for Salesforce.

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 Practice Assignment
Sign up for Free Developer Edition Organization

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 Sign up for a Developer Edition

Sign up for a free Developer Edition (DE) org to practice on how to

work in Salesforce. Try all the available features and options to learn
Salesforce.
This edition has almost all the features given by Salesforce, but with
a few limitations.
You can use this org to practice the concepts you learn in this
course.

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 Key Takeaways

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 Key Takeaways

• Salesforce is a web-based CRM that allows users to log in from anywhere with an internet connection and
browser.
• All the requirements in a CRM are present in Salesforce and it can be customized to suit individual
requirements.
• Salesforce has a multitenant architecture, is highly customizable, flexible, and scalable.
• Metadata is the architectural layer that makes Salesforce customizable.
• Application Programming Interface or API is a contract between two software through which they exchange
information.
• In Salesforce, Declarative and programmatic changes are referred to as Configuration and Customization,
respectively.
• AppExchange is the App Store of the Enterprise world.

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 This concludes “Getting Started with Salesforce Platform.”
The next lesson is “Data Model.”

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