Anyone moved off Force.com

Question

I've been developing an OEM application on Force.com for about a year, having joined a year into the project. It is consistently an exercise in frustration and disappointment, and it has become clear that every single day spent writing code on this platform is a wasted day. It is nearly impossible to build a full-featured application on Force.com and deliver it consistently to multiple clients.

I am wondering if anyone has any experience migrating off Force.com. How was this change decided? what did you move to? was it worth it?

I am desperately hoping to build a case for moving off Force.com and to provide at least the idea of what our alternatives are.

Answer 1

Ben, sorry to hear that you are having problems on the platform. At Appirio we've been successfully building large, enterprise applications on the Force.com platform for companies such as Qualcomm, Japan Post, Genentech, Dolby, Starbucks and Thomson Reuters for a number of years. Drop me a line at http://blog.jeffdouglas.com and I'll see if I can put you in contact with some of the developer evangelists at Salesforce.com. Perhaps they can help you with some of your issues. I'd be glad to help if possible.

Answer 2

Have you seen this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1664503/disadvantages-of-the-force-com-platform

Other disadvantages

• Cost per user licenceing, expensive file storage cost
• Development API below industry standards: they do not provide basic common features all other languages provide, such as switch statements, file utils (zip, copy, etc), reflection, this list could go on forever but the basic idea is that you end up writing alot more code then you would on other platforms
• SOQL is not industry standard has many features missing like offset, joining on non lookup columns, doing simple things like selecting count * on a table (sObject) with more than 1000 rows.
• No continuous/automated builds
• No easy way to backup and restore you data yourself
• No version management of your code

All in all is that salesforce is a good CRM, but if your using it for as a development environment for non CRM applications you are not using the write tool for the job!

This is evident by looking at their IDEAs exchange website, all the ideas posted for APEX, SOQL improvements normally fall on death ears as the product manager is focusing all attention to CRM, chatter and similar enhancements. Even their Slogan "No Software" makes me laugh everytime