What do I love about working at my company?
The tough challenges that our clients bring us, not to mention the way we challenge ourselves. Around here, we’re all obsessed with quality and the drive to make our clients heroes in everything we do. And as a Systems Architect, that means I get to do some really cool things.
Recently our team created a fully customizable CMS system built on Salesforce Communities. In short, it was awesome – with a long list of different features to meet our client’s needs. We are talking customizable CMS for CRM on a whole other level.
The Customizable Search Component
What good is a fancy new look and feel for CRM if you aren’t able to find the information you are looking for? This would be like riding a Kawasaki H2R on old tires that have no traction. In other words, it would take all of the fun out of the user experience. That’s where our customizable search component comes in. We built it from the ground up to use standard Salesforce technologies, kicked up a notch for even better performance.
This component uses a predictive search algorithm to show suggested search results based off just a few characters that are entered and the context of where in the community the user is making the search from. Everything was built in an abstract manner that facilitates ease of extension and polymorphism for components that wish to implement the functionality. With this architecture, we are able to add any number of customize search parameters for the global search within the community.
Faster Search: The Secrets to Speed
- What makes this search fast is the fact that we are utilizing standard Salesforce SOSL queries for full text searches across any number of different objects. We use this in conjunction with JavaScript Remoting to provide a seamless experience for our clients.
- One of the other reasons why the community is so fast is the fact that it is stateless. That means we are able to quickly pass data with JavaScript Remoting and don’t need to pass along large viewstates to and from a controller. You might be thinking, that sounds good but how does it relate to the search that was built? Simple: deep linking. All of our searches and results support deep linking. While deep linking doesn’t require stateless, it does go hand in hand with the architecture of the site. As the user searches, the URL reflects the parameters that the user used to search, which allows for sharing of the link to other users with the same context (except security) passed along.
Customizable Tagging & Filtering
The search we built also supports many different types of tagging and filtering. These too are all customizable based on the user’s context. It is entirely possible to use the same model only in different ways in two different parts of the site, all dependent on where and how the search component is being used.
At Sundog, we are often presented with some pretty daunting challenges. Through them, we can further our knowledge and expand upon our innovation. That was particularly true for this specific customized search component we built for one of our clients. Not only does it work fantastically, it exceeds our client’s needs – making them the hero of the day by giving their customers a better way for the day-to-day.
Want to know more about this custom community implementation? Let us know, and we’d be glad to give you more info.
