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Concepts, Products, and Services
As you get started with Salesforce, it’s helpful to learn some key concepts and terms. They come up frequently when you interact with the product, our documentation, and our service professionals. The concepts and terms here help you understand how Salesforce works.
Required Editions
| Available in: Salesforce Classic (not available in all orgs) |
| Available in: All Editions |
Concepts
| Concept | Definition |
|---|---|
| Cloud | A Salesforce name for a loose federation of features that help you accomplish certain types activities, such as selling products or supporting your customers. Two common examples are Service Cloud and Sales Cloud. |
| Cloud Computing | Technology that enables Internet-based services that let you sign up and log in through a browser. Salesforce delivers its service in the cloud. Other familiar cloud computing services include Google Apps and Amazon.com. |
| Software as a Service (SaaS) | Software delivered not by traditional means (such as on disk) but in the cloud, as a service. There’s nothing to download or install, and updates are automatic. |
| Trust | A Salesforce term for its company-wide commitment to building and delivering the most secure, fast, and reliable cloud-based service available. trust.salesforce.com is a systems status website that provides Salesforce customers and the community access to real-time and historical system performance information and updates. It also lists incident reports and maintenance schedules across all its key system components. trust.salesforce.com is free to all members of the Salesforce community. |
Products and Services
Salesforce includes these products and services.
| Product or Service | Description |
|---|---|
| Salesforce Applications | Salesforce includes prebuilt applications (or “apps”) for customer relationship management (CRM) ranging from sales force automation to partner relationship management, marketing, and customer service. |
| Lightning Platform | The Lightning platform is the first platform as a service (PaaS). Developers can create and deliver any kind of business application entirely on demand and without software. The platform also includes easy to use point-and-click customization tools to help you create solutions for your unique business requirements, without any programming experience. |
| AppExchange | AppExchange is a marketplace featuring hundreds of cloud applications created by Salesforce customers, developers, and partners. Many of the applications are free and all of them are pre-integrated with Salesforce, enabling you to easily and efficiently add functionality. |
| Salesforce.com Community | Salesforce provides training, support, consulting, events, best practices, and discussion boards to help you be successful. Visit Salesforce.com Community. |
Terms
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| App | Short for application. A collection of components such as tabs, reports, dashboards, and Visualforce pages that address specific business needs. Salesforce provides standard apps, which you can customize, such as Sales and Service. You can customize the standard apps to match the way you work. |
| Edition | One of several bundles of Salesforce products and services, each geared toward a different set of business needs. All Salesforce editions share the look and feel, but they vary by feature, functionality, and pricing. |
| Object | A definition of a specific type of information you can store in Salesforce. For example, the Case object lets you store information about customer inquiries. For each object, your organization has multiple, specific records. Salesforce comes with lots of standard objects, but you can create custom objects, as well. |
| Organization | A deployment of Salesforce that has a defined set of licensed users. Your organization includes all your data and applications. |
| Record | A collection of fields that store information about a specific item of a specific type. A record is an object, such as a contact, an account, or an opportunity. For example, you can have a contact record to store information about Joe Smith, and a case record store information about his training inquiry. |
| Release | Salesforce releases new products and features three times per year, and we identify releases by season—Winter, Spring, and Summer—along with the calendar year. Example: Winter ’15. For every Salesforce release, the Salesforce release notes include new features and products that are generally available or in beta release. They also describe all changes to existing features and products. You can find the release notes when you search for “Release Notes” in the Salesforce Help. |
| Salesforce | The name of the Salesforce cloud computing CRM service and the company name. |
