How Do You Work With the Force Platform?

The Force Platform is built on a foundation of multi-tenancy, which means that multiple companies share the same cloud resources, just as multiple offices exist within the same office building.

Each individual company has their own environment on the Force Platform, which is referred to as an organization, or sometimes as an org for short. An organization is your own virtual environment. Only those users and developers who are authorized can access the data and applications within your organization.

The easiest way for you to get started working with the Force Platform is to sign up for your own Developer Edition organization, which is free. A Developer Edition organization provides you full use of all the capabilities of the platform, but with limits on the number of users who can access your organization and the amount of data you can store within that organization.

The Code Share project for this book, described in more detail in the last section of this chapter, will have complete instructions for acquiring your own Developer Edition organization, which you will need to complete the hands-on examples in the rest of this book.