Unveiling the Artistry: Mastering Salesforce Architecture for Supreme Customization!
By Thapelo Seema, Salesforce Specialist
May 17, 2024 | Reversidian TechInsight
In today’s dynamic business landscape, flexibility and customization are non-negotiable for the success of any business. Salesforce, which has become one of the key CRM platforms used by businesses, stands out for its highly customizable architecture, empowering businesses to tailor their CRM solutions to meet their unique needs. This architecture of the system that allows it to be highly customizable has been a great fascination of mine and I would like to share some insights about this architecture.
Understanding Salesforce’s Multitenant Architecture:
Salesforce operates on a multitenant architecture, where multiple organizations share a single instance of the application while maintaining data isolation and security. This architecture allows for efficient resource utilization and scalability. Because Salesforce is a cloud service, businesses do not have an infrastructure management overhead, hence allowing the business more time to focus on other things, like customization.
Custom Objects and Fields:
One of the fundamental aspects of Salesforce’s customization capabilities lies in its ability to create custom objects and fields tailored to specific business processes. With over 800 standard objects and the flexibility to create custom ones, Salesforce offers high versatility in modelling data according to unique requirements. This is an instance of the ‘Configuration over code’ approach, where the system is developed to have graphical user interfaces where metadata and data can be manipulated to change the behaviour of the system, without writing any code.
Salesforce has achieved this high customizability by employing careful architectural decisions and design patterns during the development of the core platform, where attributes and behaviour, and other code units are made to be generic and flexible, therefore setting the base for an inherently customizable platform. This is what intrigues me the most, and I believe that this is how modern systems should be built. This is how configuration over code is achieved and ultimately, this is what makes Custom Fields and Objects possible.
Extending Functionality with Apex and Lightning Components:
Salesforce’s development frameworks, Apex, and Lightning Components, empower developers to extend the platform’s functionality beyond its out-of-the-box capabilities. With Apex, developers can build custom business logic, triggers, and integrations, while Lightning Components enables the creation of customized user interfaces and experiences.
The Modular and Plugin Architecture are the architectural patterns used to build extensibility into the system. These patterns dictate that the core system must be segmented into loosely coupled modules, using design patterns such as Dependency Injection, Factory Method, and the Observer Pattern. It is also a requirement to expose extension points for developers to plug in new modules that extend the system behaviour. The provision of open APIs and custom SDKs also allows developers to extend the system behaviour, and these are features found in the Salesforce architecture.
The architecture of Salesforce is inherently designed to support extensive customization, empowering businesses to adapt and thrive in today’s ever-evolving business environment. By leveraging its multitenant architecture, custom objects and fields, as well as powerful development frameworks like Apex and Lightning Components, organizations can create tailored CRM solutions that perfectly align with their unique needs and objectives.