Salesforce integration all-or-nothing

Question

We have a customer who makes use of Salesforce, but they want to develop their own site which will perform a multitude of functions some of which would require integration with Salesforce data and functionality.

In discussions with a Salesforce vendor and our customer, the Salesforce vendor pushed for the customer to do everything in Salesforce itself, as in a portal solution where their entire website is run through Salesforce, or you would switch from some basic HTML pages on your own server to Salesforce pages (Skinned to look like the customer's site).

Surely this recommendation is not in the best interests of the customer?

Doesn't this restrict and limit you to Salesforce technologies and costs?

Long term, if this company decided in the future to expand and build web-based functionality that is totally separate from Salesforce what would happen?

Let me know what you think and possibly give me a link or two to motivate what you're saying. I'm hoping that system/application architects will be the ones to answer, not Salesforce vendors.

Answer 1

This might be because they maybe talking about Salesforce Sites. Which do allow you to build a lot of custom functionality, and leverage the power of the Salesforce platform? That said, it does lock you in somewhat. It will likely also limit just what you can do. It really depends just what functionality from Salesforce they want to expose to their customers through the site. It may be a case that a salesforce customer portal (skinned to fit the corporate look and feel) would suffice, and they can leave their existing site alone.

The other option is to build all the functionality on their own site using the SOAP or REST based APIs which Salesforce offers. This has it's pros and cons too. It offers you more flexibility with what you want to do with your site, and you can always switch the hosting provider for the site too relatively easily. You could even switch from a PHP to ASP site and still have the same functionality. All of this takes time to develop. It can be used as a way around the expensive salesforce licenses though, and Salesforce just becomes a fancy database for your site in some regards.

Without knowing just how much of the data/functionality within Salesforce the customer wants on their site, And what ultimately they want to get from their website, it is difficult to give a clear answer though.

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