Key Considerations for Building a Custom App in Salesforce

If you are serious about taking your business to the next level you cannot overlook the mobile app technology. With booming Smartphone market and easy availability of innumerable mobile apps doing business has taken a 360 degree turn. Business has developed a need to make their customized apps due to their peculiar nature of business. Consumers are using mobile apps on their phones to get information and making buying decisions. Sales force too provides you the advantage to make your own apps through its Salesforce Custom Applications.

If you are an existing salesforce user or intend to be one and are looking to develop your own customized app, then you may need to consider following points.

• Asses your Requirements- The first and foremost step towards building any app is to assess your requirements precisely. Then be flexible enough as some business process may need to be altered to get desired results in custom app. Salesforce though a powerful tool but it may not be suitable for some of  your requirements. It may make more sense to use some other tool to solve a task and later integrate it with salesforce custom application.
• Do some Research- It would be prudent to checkout if the functionalities in an app that you are looking for pre-exists somewhere. You can check out AppExchange and look for some prebuilt apps of Salesforce AppExchange Partners, e.g using pre-built lightning components to enhance your lightning app.
• Deploying Mobile Apps with Salesforce- There are three common methods for deploying apps provided by salesforce, Salesforce mobile SDK, Heroku and salesforce application. Heroku for instance is a key platform for mobile app development and does not require Apple or Android experience.
• Compatibility- Custom apps don’t work in vaccum, any changes you make may have impact on others particularly when you intend to integrate them with other business systems. For reviewing existing triggers, workflows and process on re-purposed objects you may need to add condition depending on record type.
• Management- You would definitely want to ensure that your custom appis used to its full potential. As mobility solutions carry crucial data of any enterprise so suitable managing devices at app level needs to be carefully considered.