Three business cases for using Meteor and Salesforce

Some time ago I've written an article about Meteor, a great platform to quickly build communities and portals: when is it a good scenario to build one and connect it to Salesforce? Honestly I am quite curious to get a grasp of what could be good topics to cover here, so please comment below about your experience with Salesforce CRM and the scenarios where it can be enhanced with Meteor.

Meteor Apps are based on Nodejs and React (or Angular or Blaze, whichever is your taste), somehow like Salesforce you can forget about architectural problems and deploy your App on cloud and scalable hosting for a very streamlined Dev-Ops experience. Salesforce is the reference CRM system which is used to own a centralized history of clients’ interactions, offers and requests. Salesforce also has out of the box Communities for partners and customers which come with additional licenses. We are going to review three cases where quickly developing a Meteor portal with reactive technology is the winning solution.

Real-time interactions, whenever you need real-time data to stream to customers a full stack reactive technology is going to outperform any other approach. Typical examples can range from betting sites to gaming applications, in such scenarios you want the state of the data to be reflected as soon as possible from the servers to the clients. This feature is out of the box with Meteor, whereas building real-time custom applications with Salesforce Communities requires quite a lot of digging and still revolves around having the best-in-class architecture to handle any load you throw at it rather than having the best stack for the purpose.

Extremely large communities, let’s face it, licenses costs can be quite overwhelming with Sfdc if your application needs to scale to the hundreds of thousands of connected users. Moreover you better be very sure about your users life-time-value because giving them access to Customer Communities implies a direct cost to face. Meteor allows you to create both web portals and mobile apps not compromising on the multi-device capability. On the other hand Salesforce communities come with a lot of features and instant integration with your CRM. When time is a constraint the ease is a great factor, even considering that, licenses costs run up so quickly that it’s unlikely you have a business case where going live very soon is saving you that much budget.

Machine Learning and AI, Salesforce has its own tools for it but you may be building a community exactly on some specific learning algorithm or AI feature. Salesforce Communities are very good at making users interact, browse catalogs, open service requests but then all the intelligence is bounded to what is designed within Sfdc (which is a lot but may not be what you are building..) or to Apex logics (and you really don’t want to create complex stuff there; even if you want, you can’t). Say that you are building a cool deep-learning images generation community, all the learning processes can be integrated in Meteor, in fact the platform already has Machine Learning based companies developed with it, like Ellipse a startup operating in the language processing field. They described Meteor platform as a “no-trade-off-required” experience for their developments.
Finally you should most definitely have a central CRM in both architectures, either with Communities or with Meteor. It is paramount to host all your customer history and coordinate your business processes in the same place, but it is not the topic for this article. Are you curious to know if your scenario can be served with Meteor or Salesforce Communities? Are you building real-time applications and need a way to organize your processes?