The Enterprise Force.com Architect

This article was originally published for DeveloperForce on December 30, 2014. See the following link: http://sforce.co/1CRU29o Salesforce1 is a powerful platform that allows your organization to transform itself. But as Salesforce has grown, so too has the scope and complexity of managing the platform. As a Salesforce Architect it is your responsi... bility to understand and orchestrate all the moving parts. This can be quite an overwhelming proposition just when you consider some of the components that have been covered by this blog series: So how do you being to approach managing Salesforce1 Enterprise Implementations? Should all of your Salesforce resources be on the same team? Should Salesforce teams be distributed across Development, Architecture, and Operations? What is the best software development methodology to use? What tools are necessary? What are the roles and responsibilities that you need to consider when scaling Salesforce into your enterprise? And why should you the Salesforce Architect, care about this? Lets start with the easiest question first: why should the Salesforce Architect be concerned with these issues? If you have looked into the qualification criteria for a Salesforce.com Certified Technical Architect (CTA) you may be wondering why there are so many non-Salesforce aspects of the certification. Not only must you understand Salesforce inside and out; you must also understand things like Integration Architecture, Governance, Application Lifecycle Management, Change Management, Test Strategy, Release Strategy, etc. The reason behind this is that only someone who understands the Salesforce1 platform AND these other components is truly qualified to lead a large Enterprise to their best approach for managing Salesforce. So what goes into a good design for managing Salesforce1? Here are some of my recommendations: Salesforce Architecture should fall under (and be a key driver) of your Organizations Enterprise Architecture This means following architectural guidance of any EA frameworks ...Read More