At Dreamforce 2008, Force.com SITES was announced, as a way to extend your Force.com applications (using Visualforce) to the public. Since companies already have critical data in Salesforce.com and living on the Force.com platform, opening this data up to the public can be powerful.
For example, companies who use the GOODrecruit application to manage their hiring processes, can now allow candidates to apply to positions online, and these applications can be pushed directly into the GOODrecruit application, via Force.com SITES!
Additional examples include:
APPS -> SITES
Public Recruiting
Event Makreting
Public Product Catalog
Vendor Management
Customer Surveys
The rough process to develop is:
1. Build Force.com app
2. Design web interfcace in Visualforce
3. Create a Force.com Site with your URL
4. Use your URL with a CNAME alias
5. Active!
Several examples of web pages come with Force.com Sites, including:
Bandwidth Exceeded
Under Construction
Site Login
Site Register
Forgot Password
Live Examples of Sites
1. Universal Commmunciations
2. Developer.force.com
Universal Communications Product Bundles – An example was shown of how a marketing person could modify the product bundles on the Force.com platform to update the Force.com publicly viewed Sites, making it quicker to deploy changes in smaller organizations. Essentially, the person who drives the content can now speed up the process of deploying changes.
Force.com Sites Developer Challenge
You can win t-shirts, ipod nanos and touches, by competing in the developer challenge (an extension of hte Hack-a-thon at Dreamforce).
Sign up here!
A few questions answered included:
-Pilot Program available Q1 2009. Production Release is TBD.
-All validation rules for the Visualforce pages are enforced.
-Intranet – you can specify an IP address, to make your Sites page only accessible for an intranet.
-Sandbox – You can develop your sites pages on your sandbox, and then deploy to production.
If you missed the webinar, I will post it here when I receive it.