Bracket Labs has a pretty simple goal: build awesome, native Salesforce apps that help our customers get more done. Whether they’re helping a Marketing team manage their campaign schedule, helping a Customer Success team manage explosive growth in new customers, or helping a Sales team manage their day-to-day activities, our apps are designed to be an integral part of a customer’s Salesforce experience.

Given our focus on delivering seamless app functionality within Salesforce, we were thrilled by the announcement of our Salesforce1 mobile app. I’m talking, hopping-up-and-down-and-high-fiving-strangers thrilled, because the Salesforce1 Paltform provides huge user experience benefits by:

• Allowing us to deliver a mobile app experience that merges perfectly with our customers’ mobile Salesforce usage, including a single navigational framework, unified design language, and familiar use patterns.

• Enabling us to build and maintain a single mobile code base that delivers a consistent experience on any mobile device.

• Distributing our mobile app as part of our existing app package, making it immediately available to mobile users (for any readers who have been through a mobile app store review process, you know what a big deal this is).

We got started building immediately, using TaskRay (our project management app) as a guinea pig. We identified the major TaskRay functions our customers needed on their mobile devices and designed an app interface to make those functions feel easy and obvious. Once our development team started building we realized something we hadn’t expected: building an app on the Salesforce1 Platform was fast. We literally went from sketched mockups to having it working on our customers’ smartphones in 4 days.

In preparation for writing this blog post I did a bit of a post-mortem analysis with our team, and the consensus is that this incredible velocity can be attributed to two factors that should allow anyone to quickly deliver awesome apps.

1. Salesforce1 was built with platform best practices in mind. It has a myriad of flexible, reusable components and design patterns that developers can leverage to both avoid “re-building the wheel” and to ensure that their app feels holistically integrated. Combining Mobile Cards, FlexiPages, and Chatter Publisher Actions with custom Visualforce and JavaScript allows developers to rapidly build unique app features that flow seamlessly with standard Salesforce1 functionality.
2. There’s a wealth of Salesforce1 resources available. Not just documentation, but a whole host of useful and instructive materials like the excellent sample projects built by the Salesforce Developer Evangelists (check out this favorite from Pat “metadaddy” Patterson on GitHub), the Salesforce1 style guide site, and even developers sharing reusable code from their own projects like this Bootstrap Theme for Salesforce1. These are the type of resources that are invaluable for saving time in understanding what’s possible, how to approach it, and how to get the details right.

And best of all, the resulting app is a huge hit with TaskRay customers. Using the TaskRay Mobile app within Salesforce1, they are managing the status of their projects and tasks, diving into as much detail as needed, and collaborating effortlessly via Chatter. We’ve even seen customers adding users to TaskRay who never previously had access because of their field-based roles. It’s now possible for their users to work anywhere, from any device. Ultimately this is the biggest reason to build a Salesforce1 mobile app – it delivers increased value to your customers and it opens new markets for you.

For more information, go to: http://bracketlabs.com/