This month's AppExchange All-Star post comes from JP Seabury, leader of the New Hampshire User Group. JP is an active member of the Salesforce community and has used a variety of AppExchange apps at different organizations. You can also follow him on Twitter (
@jpseabury) or via his
blog. Take it away JP!
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When Sara Varni Bright (Sr. Marketing Manager, AppExchange) asked me to write an article on my favorite AppExchange apps, my first thought was "Oh my, where do I begin?" Then she said, "3-5 paragraphs would be ideal," and my next thought was "Mission: Impossible."
I currently work as Principal Salesforce.com Architect for Comcast, but I've also managed a Force.com technical consulting company and volunteered development / admin time for Salesforce Foundation grant recipients. I've downloaded and used more than 30 different apps, for various organizations. It is tough narrowing the list down, but here are my Top 5:
App: DocuSign for Salesforce
Partner: DocuSign
Cost: Free 30-day trial, $35/user/month
Description:
I top-listed this application, because I’ve deployed it at three different companies. The results have always been superlative. Docusign allows you to send an electronic document to a customer, such as a sales or service contract, and get the customer-signed copy back in minutes. No more waiting for faxes or snail mail. DocuSign has continued to evolve the product since I first used it; it now incorporates Chatter and useful dashboards from which you can track the status of pending and/or completed DocuSign returns. Customers find it easy to use, and love how this tool accelerates the close process.
App: LOOP Document Services
Publisher: Drawloop Technologies
Cost: LOOP to PDF: free; LOOPlus Basic: $7 per user/month (no minimum users - $12 Standard, $18 Enterprise, $30 Unlimited); LOOP Merge: $4 per user/month; LOOP Reports: $500-$1,200 per org/year (mass reports - $ per report); 30-day free trial for all services
Description:
DrawLoop is an extremely powerful, highly flexible application that allows you to automate various types of documents. Have a PowerPoint presentation that you need to update monthly and deliver to your executive team? Don’t spend hours exporting the raw data from Salesforce, making it pretty in Excel graphs and then building a PowerPoint slidedeck! Use DrawLoop to simplify that process to a click of a button – and let your management team get their weekly/monthly updates “on demand”. I’ve used DrawLoop and DocuSign as a tool for getting customer survey feedback directly into Salesforce. It can also be used to automate price quotes, proposals, contracts, and more. The company has fantastic product support, as I commented on my AppExchange review of this product.
App: Action Plans
Publisher: Force.com Labs
Cost: Free
Description:
Action plans is a new app, recently released by Force.com Labs over the summer. The application allows you to define standard “business processes” when certain trigger events occur. If a picture is worth a thousand words, than a YouTube video is worth even more. Check out this quick,
2-minute demo of the Action Plans App. The best thing about Action Plans is that it is an unmanaged app, so you can open it up, look at the code, and expand it to support other custom objects in your org, with very little effort.
App: Dashboard Pack
Publisher: Force.com Labs
Cost: Free
Description:
Dashboards and the internal reporting analytics are some of the most powerful features of salesforce.com, but new Admins often struggle about what they should build. This free app is starting to show it’s age (it was built and last updated in 2007) but powerful in that it included all of the free Dashboards that had been built previously by Force.com Labs. By installing this one app, the Admin had Dashboards that covered Sales, Marketing, Support, User Adoption, and more. Aside from being a real time-saver, these Dashboards general give Admins ideas on new ways to build reports and dashlet components, that they hadn’t thought of before.
App: Ideas in Action
Publisher: Force.com Labs
Cost: Free
Description:
The IdeaExchange is one of my favorite places to visit on the Salesforce.com website, and I make sure to deploy the Ideas app in every org that I work with. But you can’t simply enable ideas and expect wonderful results – you need to act on those ideas! This app, from Force.com Labs, helps you do that. With Ideas in Action, you’re “Idea Moderators” can create projects that turn Ideas into projects, allowing you to manage those projects from Idea to Implementation. Like all Force.com Labs apps, you can customize and modify the app to suit your business needs.
These are just some of my favorite apps. As you can see, I’m a big fan of Force.com Labs. I’m also a big fan of low cost (and Free!) – even when it means a little extra effort getting it to work in my org. When you next visit the AppExchange, check out all the free apps published by Force.com Labs. There are dozens of them! Even if you don’t use the applications as is, you can generally modify them (or just get ideas from them) to extend the usefulness of Salesforce.com within your organization.