My question may sound simplistic but I am new, so please forgive me.
What I want to know, is a clear definition of a salesforce edition and a salesforce license. What is the difference here in terms of usage?
When I buy salesforce for my organisation, do I have to buy 1 edition across my organisation, or can I say, depending on the needs of my organisation, purchase different editions, and still able to create a custom salesforce app that would be visible for all these editions?
In terms of cost, do different licenses in the same edition cost different?
Best Answer
Licenses are associated with individual users and make functionality available. For example, a Salesforce license has access to the sales cloud functionality (Leads, Opportunities) that a platform license doesn't. There are also feature licenses that can be applied to a user to add functionality. For example, Mobile User is a feature license that allows a user with an existing license to use Salesforce Mobile. There are many other licenses available and it can get rather bewildering at times, especially as the license names change on occasion.
A Salesforce edition is the "type" (for want of a better work) of your Salesforce instance. The edition determines:
To add to this, some limits are a based on a combination of edition and user license. Data storage, for example, is 20Mb per licensed user on Enterprise Edition, but 120Mb per licensed user on Unlimited Edition.
With regard to different licenses per edition, yes there would be a different cost, but it would still be based on the edition. Thus you couldn't mix Enterprise and Unlimited licenses in Unlimited Edition. Every user must have a license appropriate for the edition, and these get more expensive as the capability of the edition increases.
If you are considering multiple editions of Salesforce in a single organisation, you can create a salesforce app and deploy it to each edition. If you need the same data across all editions you'd need to look at Salesforce 2 Salesforce to replicate the data, which brings a few challenges of its own. For multi-edition you'd need to consider:
Multi-edition does have some advantages though:
The way I normally approach this is to start with a single edition and whenever a new business area comes on board, evaluate whether its better for them to share the existing edition or use one of their own.