On 28^th October 2012, Suyati’s Salesforce Evangelist group (as we like to call ourselves!) celebrated the launch of Kerala’s first Salesforce community at Infopark, Kochi.

The meetup promoted by Suyati Technologies, and organized by the Salesforce user group in Kerala had 4 engaging sessions conducted by Mr. Abhinav Gupta (Salesforce.com MVP), Mr. Siddhesh Kabe (Senior Developer, Salesforce.com India) , Mr. Shivanath Devinarayanan   and Mr. Abhishek Sivasubramanian (both Software Developers at Suyati Technologies).

The introductory session by Shiv, gave insights into the Force.com platform and the Salesforce CRM.

The following session by Abhinav highlighted the capabilities of Force.com platform and about its easy integration with any technology. He spoke about “Workbench”, which is a utility that can plug into Salesforce.com via Salesforce web services. Through Workbench, you can perform CRUD operations as well as SOQL and SOSL queries on standard and custom objects. There was also a demonstration on how you can create a REST based application that talks to Salesforce for pulling and pushing information through JSON requests and response. In short, an amazing session, with tons of information about tools, methodologies and mechanisms that can be used to build Salesforce.com applications.

The next session focused on how rapidly one could develop a Salesforce application! This was demonstrated through a live example. The session started with the speaker Siddhesh conducting a survey on the time taken to create a meetup application capable of recording data about participants, and recording new meetup group registration using ASP.NET, PHP, JAVA and Salesforce.com. Everyone agreed that Salesforce would take the least time, with the development taking just a day. But what a surprise when Siddhesh completed the development within 15 minutes! The session enabled the attendees to get a deep insight into the application coding cycle in Salesforce from custom object creation to Visualforce and then to Force.com sites for publishing. The application was accessed by us on our mobile devices and we could test its performance.

The concluding session was conducted by me (Hear hear!). The session was on Visualforce Charting, a new feature available in the Winter’ 13 release of Salesforce.com. The basics of Visualforce markups and Visualforce controllers were explained and compared with HTML and ASP.NET so that the audience could get a clear idea of Visualforce. Areas like when to use, how to use, best practices to be followed during development of Visualforce were explained. The concept of Charting was introduced, followed by a practical session that explained the key advantage of using Visualforce.

Thus ended a very informative and useful Salesforce meetup with the audience having gained a cloudful of knowledge! Kudos to Suyati Technologies for supporting such initiatives!