Plan Custom App Development in Salesforce Using these Considerations

Business processes are never fully optimized, there is always some room for improvement. In the current digital realm where services are easily accessible and fast-paced, organizations need to be more proactive than ever.

Making changes in processes and workflows can help you bridge value gaps and stay ahead of the curve. While there are many platforms on which you can build bespoke apps for project management/customer management, Salesforce is one of its kind.

The #1 SaaS platform has all the tools you need to dynamic custom apps from scratch. You can use the platform’s drag-drop tools available on Lightning to create apps the way you want. If you don’t want to spend time developing apps on Salesforce, you have third-party apps and components on AppExchange to speed up the development process.

You can integrate suitable apps or functionality from these third-party solutions and bridge the gaps in your process. While Salesforce custom application development can fulfill most of your customization needs, you must keep note of various development considerations to maximize app performance and ROI.

Understand Capabilities and Limitations of Salesforce

Before you begin the development process, define the goals you wish to achieve. For this, you need to have an open mind. Be prepared to propose and embrace ideas suggested by other stakeholders and developers to get the desired result in your custom app.

While Salesforce is a powerful tool with superior customization capabilities, it may not be the best tool to bring out every change that you need. If a functional process is overly complex to design, you should leverage other tools and integrate it with Salesforce thereafter – e.g., making complex commission calculations in Salesforce may not be suitable, however, you can leverage excel or some other tool for this purpose.

Make Use of Pre-Existing Solutions

Developing custom apps from scratch can cause time waste and cost burnout when not done strategically. Before getting started with designing, you should check for pre-existing solutions on the Salesforce marketplace “AppExchange”.

On AppExchange you may find apps that perform the same task for which you need custom development. You can simply buy the license of that app and integrate it with your Salesforce. Before you begin the design phase, check:

• If there are any apps or objects that can be leveraged to minimize customization? If yes, then check if their Apex or Visualforce scripts are available or not. These scripts will help you implement code with ease. Make sure to take the complexity of updates and code changes into account before finalizing an app for customization.
• If there are any pre-built Lightning components available? In the Lightning component framework, you can find all the tools and extensions that enable reusable component development for standalone apps and mobile app customization.

Keep Note of Visibility, Search ability, and Data Security

While creating a data model for your custom app, make data security a top priority. For this, you should carefully consider object-level security (CRUD), field-level security (FLS), and record-level security in the application. This is extremely crucial, especially if external users will be using your app via a community.

Additionally, Master-detail relationships in Salesforce should be carefully analyzed as it dictates how users (including community users) are accessing records. If you are concerned about data visibility, consider going for lookup relationships as they offer more visibility over the related records.

If you are using some object more frequently, consider adding a tab for it. Often we are asked by customers why a certain object is not searchable, the solution to this is to make objects searchable. If you forget this or do want to make changes in this aspect, only custom objects will be included in the search results.

Check App’s Compatibility with Existing Solutions

A variety of apps are interconnected with one another on Salesforce. Making wrong customization decisions can severely impact the performance of one of these app components. Ensure that the proposed changes are positively impacting the performance of other workflows and not otherwise.

If you are making custom changes related to accounts, contacts, triggers, validation rules, or integration, lay special emphasis on compatibility with other solutions. For triggers, validation rules, processes and workflows, you may need to add conduction based on record types. For accounts and contacts customization, you might need to create new record types and layouts so that the differentiation can be easily made between the two.

In case you want to integrate data, check whether the data from external applications is to be stored in Salesforce or accessed in real-time. If you want to use data from external objects in real-time, prefer Salesforce Connect. For this, you won’t need to store data in Salesforce.

Bottomline

Developing a custom app in Salesforce adds to productivity and certainly helps in overcoming process gaps. Salesforce has so many tools using which you can carry out customization at lightning speed. Despite these features, Salesforce custom application development can be highly challenging if you don’t have sufficient platform understanding. In such a case, it’s always beneficial to align experienced Salesforce AppExchange partners with a rich history and proven track record in implementing custom solutions. Onboarding a Salesforce development company not only ensures success but also saves you from potential cost burnouts and delays. By following the right guidelines and having experts alongside, you can overcome gaps in your business and execute customization without any hassle.