What is the difference between 'SAS' and 'Salesforce'

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I would be starting ft in one company, where i was been told that the application is developed using 'Sas' and 'salesforce'. What is the difference between two? And which are recommended online resource which I can use to learn more about it.

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sassalesforcesaas

1 Answers

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SAS is software for statistical analysis. If your company/job description doesn't look like working with large sets of data & complex reporting that's probably not it.

They probably mean SaaS (Software as a Service) model, also known as "the cloud", cloud computing etc. You write the program (or use / modify existing one) but you don't buy servers, worry about network connection, electricity costs, load balancing (spikes in traffic will not cause your website to go down). Many apps operate in this model. Microsoft's Azure cloud (or even online wersions of MS Office). There's Siebel Oracle on Demand CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP I think also has SaaS offering... It's a big topic, I'm simplifying a lot here. And then there are Platform as a Service things too (PaaS) where they give you "just" the hosting etc but no base application to build on top of. You write everything you need from scratch and upload it. Think Heroku or Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Salesforce is "just" one more SaaS application. You start with base application & database, similar to all other clients in the world. You can install plugins to it (some free, some paid), configure it yourself, write custom code if your functionality is too complex... You can do a lot with just clicks & drag & drop but if you need to code stuff then JavaScript (for client-side) and Apex (for server-side) will be your friend. Apex is bit similar to Java.

Where to start... Trailhead is good source of self-paced trainings. You can sign up for a free Salesforce Developer Edition (has almost all features as the paid one but limited storage space), try to pass some courses... Or in SF help&training there should be tons of videos (actually in that link whole left menu "getting started with salesforce" might be good).