The simple but effective sforce developer tools, available for both Microsoft .NET and generic Java platforms, use today's Web services standards to let your IT department build custom software that works with Salesforce's Web-based CRM application. To understand how these sforce toolkits work is arguably to understand the future of service-oriented software.

Using function calls built on Web services, sforce developers can log in and invoke functionality on the standard Salesforce.com-hosted CRM solution in custom applications. The sforce APIs themselves are remarkably simple, with just a handful of basic actions like executing queries, updates, and insert and delete operations.

Within Salesforce.com's hosted ASP solution resides a database for keeping track of about 30 entities needed for effective CRM. In the .NET toolkit, the sforce add-in browser tool allows .NET programmers to browse core Salesforce.com entities (such as users, products, and price books) and entities that model the sales process itself (such as leads and opportunities). Because the business logic here for each entity is low-level (querying, updating, deleting, and inserting records only), it will be up to your developers to build higher-level business logic on top of these basic database operations. The good news is we found that it's easy to get started on this, at least with the Visual Studio add-in tools.