PaaS Magic from Coda with Force.com and Google Apps
by Anshu Sharma, VP Product Management on June 3, 2008 at 03:16 PM
The value of platform as a service (PaaS) is not that you can take your on-premise applications and run them in the cloud - that's so ASP! In my opinion (and what would a blog be without one), the real value is in enabling functionality that was simply impossible or too hard in an on-premise world.
For a great example,check out what Coda is doing with Force.com and Google Apps.
Coda is a Platform as a Service partner of salesforce.com building their next generation SaaS application on the Force.com platform.
In Coda's Andrew Fawcett's own words:
Following the recent launch of the Salesforce and Google Apps offerings, we have prototyped our own CODA 2go-specific Google Apps integration! This has been built using a Google Gadget, Apex code and Visualforce and the result has got us and everyone we demonstrated it to at Dreamforce very excited about the possibilities this proof of concept opens up.
Our experience of producing finance software over decades is that accountants love manipulating transactions in spreadsheets! The success of our on-premise CODA-XL product (which extends Microsoft Excel) has been outstanding, with virtually all customer organisations adopting it enthusiastically. Now in the on-demand world we have produced an equivalent solution that uses Google Spreadsheets and Force.com.
The initial prototype can be used to perform a Cost Allocation over extracted transaction details from the CODA 2go product. The user can then apportion new values by editing the cells used by formulas in the spreadsheet; we then post back the results in the form of a journal back into CODA 2go from within the Google Spreadsheet user interface via a Visualforce-powered Google Gadget!
Note that this functionality was conceived, designed and built in weeks. Let me know if you have seen this pace of innovation in the on-premise world.
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Comments
Posted by Jon Mountjoy on June 4, 2008 03:24 AM:
What's also interesting about your post is that you don't even mention that word - mashup. We take it as a given - we are mashing up, it's what you do, it's simple and it opens up awesome opportunities.
Posted by Kevin Roberts on June 5, 2008 06:50 AM:
Picking up on this mash-up theme, one of the opportunities I'm excited about is taking this ability to securely pull and push data from force.com into a Google Gadget and combine that with the ability to easily push Gadgets into the iGoogle Portal. The result would be an already widely used and accepted 'home page' that could also include key metrics and reports from back office systems. On the CODA blog ( http://blog.coda2go.com/2008/06/05/accounting-data-in-your-igoogle-homepage/ )I've posted an example of key financial information pushed to iGoogle via Gadgets with data sourced from CODA 2go. As Jon says all because we'll have access to data in a 'mash-up enabled' environment.
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