Force.com Sites Deep Dive

Salesforce.com has been unleashing a full-court press on the Force.com Sites platform with a Deep Dive webinar today. Sites was pushed heavily at the Cloudforce Seattle event last week and today offered a further look under the covers. The idea is fairly simple. Provide a platform to host websites that can easily integrate with your existing Salesforce.com applications: Workflow, rules, analytics etc.

The Sites development is done through VisualForce, which allows for anytime of user interface to be developed. This includes Flash and rich media down to vanilla HTML. Security is handled similarly to Salesforce.com and other cloud providers through a security profile per site. Sites offers some advance caching that goes beyond many dedicate web hosts. Overall, Sites is an impressive way to deliver web functionality through the Salesforce.com cloud. Google Analytics will be supported through the traditional JavaScript includes. I was expecting simplified configuration functionality as found in WordPress. Expect this in later versions.

Microsoft will have the ability to offer similar functionality through hosted Dynamics CRM and Azure. Windows Azure is slated for production later in the year and Force.com Sites live today. The cloud is going to look very different in 2010.