10 Reasons Why Force.com is the Ideal Tool for
Situational Applications

Force.com offers a powerful new way to build situational applications - solutions aimed at solving immediate business challenges in a cost-effective way by specifically addressing the situation at hand.

Situational applications typically address areas that cannot be affordably built using traditional IT methodology, or are of low priority to the IT department.  Therefore, they have typically been kludged together in a suboptimal, inefficient and incomplete solution using tools like Excel and email.  Other solutions like MS Access have also been problematic in that they are not usually supported by IT, are difficult to scale, and are usually isolated from access to enterprise data.

But situational applications are growing in importance as a result of the need to increase agility and reduce costs at a time when increasing revenues is hard to do.  Fortunately, Force.com provides a compelling solution.

With Force, you can:

1.       Build powerful applications inexpensively.  Force provides a set of tools that allows for the rapid development and deployment of applications.  

2.       Deploy applications inexpensively.  There is no hardware to procure, software to install and keep updated, or backup to plan for.  There is only a simple per user monthly fee that can be paid for with a credit card – and stopped at any time.

3.       Scale applications as needed.  Applications can easily be scaled to more users, more data and more functionality.  There is no need to move it to another platform (hardware, database, programming language) in order to scale it.

4.       Let users build their own applications.  Force provides a set of easy to use point-and-click tools that allow end users to develop their own database applications, much as they develop their own Excel solutions. 

5.       Make enterprise data available in a secure and controlled manner.  Force provides built-in functionality to make it easy to securely provide enterprise data to users that they can use for building their own applications.

6.       Extend user applications effectively.  Force allows the use of multiple methods to extend an application, from simple point-and-click to regular programming languages.  This allows IT to extend user-built applications easily.

7.       Embrace incrementalism.  Because the overhead of starting up an IT project is so great, it only makes sense to tackle large projects with a significant payback.   A situational application is never going to have the impact of a single application, like ERP.  But the incremental impact of a multitude of small situational applications can result in geometric growth in productivity.  Force makes this much more feasible.

8.       Embrace change. Change is the enemy of traditional applications.  Requirements are frozen in time, and are only changed with great reluctance, because change creates a cascading affect across the various roles involved in the process.  Force makes the implementation of changes much simpler – a key requirement of situational applications.

9.       Use an efficient methodology.  Because of all the built-in functionality, many applications can be built and deployed by a single person, instead of having to spread functionality across many different “experts” (database administrators, system administrators, technical architects, etc.).

10.    Use built-in functionality. Unlike typical programming tools used to build an application from scratch, Force makes use of preexisting software components, including report generators and data analysis programs, and provides ready-to-go integration with Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon.