We have an OEM managed package with similar goals: The end user shouldn’t have to see Salesforce. We originally wanted to make it a completely whitelisted experience, however, more and more we have been accepting the fact that some things cannot be reskinned. With that being said, all of our pages are child pages with a master page that hides the SF header/sidebar, global navigation, and global search. This works very well for us, and many users do not know it is Salesforce. Have you used the Skuid header and global search? For us, this replaces the need for the standard header completely.
For reports/dashboards, we use Skuid charts/graphs. I actually prefer the look and feel of these over Salesforce’s. However, the end user doesn’t get to put together their own reports outside of allowing them to filter the source data. You could probably get very fancy with creating models in javascript based on client inputs and using that to drive the source of a chart. We have not gone down that path before.
For files, we use the Skuid files object for uploads and displaying. I have not tried to use the standard content/file functionality with Skuid.
We’re a little different when it comes to login/logout since we use TrialForce for OEMs which allows a customized login experience. For logout, you can redirect to this URL ‘/secur/logout.jsp’ to logout. For login, you can use mydomain in salesforce to customize that look and branding. Communities also has a nice interface for building a custom login screen.
Ultimately, you have to get creative to keep everything inside of Skuid. For things like automatic emails, using a hidden field updated by a row action to fire an email has worked well for us. At the end of the day, not everything can be replicated in Skuid (for now). We even created our own email template functionality using javascript in an effort to replicate Salesforce’s email templates.
I’m happy to speak to any other specific workarounds to keep everything Skuidified.
