External SalesForce Forms

Question

Is it possible to create external SalesForce Forms that can populate fields in the same way as inside salesforce?

We offer online teaching and the idea is that teachers, after every lesson, can fill in a timesheet and select the student and their own name from a master detail relationship with one of the other object via a lookup field or drop down list -- similar to how you can do it in Salesforce.

I've tried to do it using form Assembly, but the fields do not appear in the resulting forms.

So is it possible to duplicate the experience from inside salesforce, but on a form that teachers can use to submit data after every lesson?

Answer 1

This seems like a good use case for a Community, which in Salesforce is essentially a portal in which your partners can interact with your Salesforce instance and data in a controller manner, but not as full users. To do things like view accounts, cases, leads or submit information. This is the overview on Salesforce communities http://www.salesforce.com/communities/overview/, it's a big topic of course and implementing it is definitely not a quick thing, but given what your business model sounds like, it may be a good fit for you.

On the other hand, you could also implement this similar to web to lead or case, using the rest or soap api, and creating a web form, and then submitting the information to salesforce via the api. That would be more of a one off, solve this use case solution though.

Answer 2

To directly answer your question yes it can be done.

1. Salesforce Sites, although you will have to build your own access control if needed.

2. Your own web server that utilizes the preexisting Salesforce API

If you want an internal SF way of doing it the other answer about communities would be a good fit if you can swing the licenses but you asked for external so.....