Software as a service
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is going to be big. This really struck home a few month’s ago when I built the System Technology Institute web site. That may not be a surprise to you but it’s news to some — just last week I was asked my opinion on whether SOA was “real.”
This project had to be a quick job — it was a freebie build, so I wanted to keep the it as short as possible. At the same time, it had to be reliable, look good and deliver a full range of services: A back-end database for CRM management, course catalogs and curriculum, online student registration, enrollment and payment and of course, an easy-to-use browsable class calendar. The “nice to have” list included rotating page content, class tracking and scheduling, and instructor booking among a few others.
After getting in a few estimates on the order of three or more months and at least $20,000, I decided to do it myself. It took all of two weeks to build the new site, from scratch, thanks to service oriented software.
After a few days of research looking into potential back-end technology, I went with Salesforce.com. The leading contender, Sugar, looked like it could do the job but lacked two critical elements: A solid, developed API that demonstrated longevity and reliability and a long list of partner services that could “fill in the gaps” of functionality that we needed. Granted, Sugar was very tempting as an open source solution, but its relative immaturity and limited number of partners were the decided factor.
Salesforce.com offered everything we needed in regard to CRM. Campaign management, service request support and sales order modules made it possible to quickly build the services STI customers would need. The only missing pieces where campaign outreach (meaning volume email support for newsletters and the like) and a reasonable student body class enrollment system.
Through Salesforce.com’s partners we found both of these missing pieces. Vertical Response provides a wide range of email and postal mail services, fully integrated with the Salesforce.com solution. And, the Salesforce support team had produced a basic class enrollment module — freely downloadable and fully customizable to our precise needs. This saved us a few days of development and really showed how thoroughly Salesforce.com can be customized with new modules.
Within one week I had Salesforce.com configured to manage STI business. The final piece, building a System Technology Institute branded web site, relied on a solid API into Salesforce.com. Fortunately, it’s there in spades: Fully supported API’s in PHP, Java, .NET and a few other flavors. This was quite possible the move that made Salesforce.com the market leader it is today. With a quick result in mind, I choose PHP and had a basic STI-branded class catalog prototype up and running within a matter of hours. The Salesforce.com API provides full access to the entire back-end database — meaning that there really are virtually no limits to the range of integration we can employ.
It took less than one more week to finish the STI web site. Most of the effort went into the design. Salesforce.com provides a number of easily-integrated web forms that feed directly into the CRM system (for example, the STI subscription page is a customized Salesforce.com web registration form). Those areas that required a little bit of work where easily accomplished using PHP to query the Salesforce.com database and display information on the STI web site.
From start to finish, the project took seventeen days. Granted, we are saddled with an Enterprise license for Salesforce.com, but the cost is quite reasonable at about $2,000 per year. The added benefits and full-scale CRM features — not to mention the huge partner library and third party applications — give STI capabilities that would simply not have been an option otherwise. The end result is a large-Enterprise solution, built-to-order on a dime and at a very reasonable cost.
