Three Salesforce.com AppExchange Products We Cannot Live Without
Like the Apple App Store, Salesforce.com has an AppExchange with over 1,000 installable applications for your Salesforce instance. The apps range from small utilities like prebuilt sales dashboards to full blown custom applications like the recruiting application from Jobscience. Like most app stores, some are paid and some are free. Here are three of them that Arkus uses heavily and cannot live without.
Appirio Calendar Sync for Salesforce and Google Apps by Appirio
This is an oldie but a must have. It's free, simple to install, and you can set it up to have one way or two way sync between your Salesforce calendar and your Google Apps calendar. It works flawlessly and throw in that you can add a Google calendar to your iCal or Outlook and you now have your business and personal calendars in one simple spot. You also save time on your Mobile Devices since you do not have to log into the Salesforce.com App to see your calendar. The only concern about this application is that Appirio has hidden the App on the AppExchange. Is that a sign that they are no longer supporting it? I don't know. You can still find it via a browser search so enjoy it while you can.
Super follow Buttons for Chatter by Force.com Labs
As a huge adopter of Chatter, this Force.com Labs Free application is a huge time saver. This lets you follow Accounts, Contacts, Cases, or any custom object from list views or search results. You just click the ones you want to follow and hit the Follow button. This is a great example of Salesforce adding useful features outside of their regular release schedule via the Force.com Labs program.
Conga Composer by AppExtremes
This is the mother of all add-on applications. It isn't free but it is worth every penny if you have any need to customize outputs from Salesforce data. It allows you to gather any data from multiple objects and or related lists and generate sophisticated documents using Word, Excel, PDF and PowerPoint. As mentioned in one of our previous blogs, we use Conga Composer to generate our proposals and it works seamlessly. In addition we have now added Project Status and Project Plan reports. It saves our team many hours and we look forward to working with it even more. It's also great for those who need mail merge and cannot use the Salesforce feature because of its limitations (IE only as the biggest). We highly recommend Conga and give their support team five stars.
The AppExchange has many applications doing many things ranging from simple enhancements to complex document generation. As mentioned above, these are three that everyone at Arkus finds extremely useful. Whether you may find them useful or not, we suggest you go to the AppExchange and look around. I am certain there is something out there that could help your organization in some way. The last thing we wanted to point out is make sure you do your homework before you install something in production. It's best to test something out in your sandbox as you never know how it might impact your users. Just because it is listed on the Appexchange doesnt make it good or a right fit.