Rhonda is the lead Salesforce administrator at Audatex, a Solera Company that delivers technology solutions, shared services, and consulting for the insurance and claims industries. She's an Advanced Salesforce Administrator and Certified Developer, and active in the Salesforce Community using the nickname rpr2. She's also the co-leader of the San Diego Salesforce.com User Group.
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As the system administrator at an organization with a diverse group of over 200 users, I’m always on the lookout for packages on the AppExchange that can save me development time and avoid the need to “reinvent the wheel.” Recently, when I was looking through my organization’s user log I decided to graph my AppExchange logins (yes, I’m a data freak) and discovered that I log into AppExchange at least twice a month. This doesn’t even capture the times that I’m just browsing the site without logging in.

In April, I was busy gathering requirements from a new group of users. Because of items I found on AppExchange, all customizations, development, and testing got completed by June. I keep returning to the AppExchange site because I find so much of value there.
Many of my favorite apps have already been written about in previous months –
Demand Tools,
DupeBlocker,
Vertical Response, and
Exact Targetto name just a few.
There’s also many wonderful apps that have been published on AppExchange that are free. The number keeps growing and is currently at 468. I’d like to highlight a few of the free apps that I use, where not only is the price perfect and functionality great, but so is the support that I’ve received. Almost all of the free apps are going to be listed as having “no support”, but my experience has been that many of the authors of these apps have provided great support – often proactively, sometimes after a posting on a community site such as the discussion board for
Force.com Labs Development and Projects or the
Answers site.

Publisher: Force.com Labs
App: Security Health Check
Function: Scans your system's security-related settings and produces a report with areas of possible exposure and remediation recommendations.
Support Experience: Contacted directly by the author after having a problem during the install. Issue (a bug) was quickly resolved. Also, very responsive in finding a solution to the app using up multiple tabs in the "pre-aloha app" days.
Publisher: Sales Optimizer
App: Activities Tab
Function: Simply adds a tab for easy access to activities. Such a simple thing that can make such a big difference in usability and productivity.
Support Experience: Was proactively contacted by the company after I installed the app. I did have one question which the salesperson researched with the developer and quickly responded to me.
Publisher: Print Sf
App: Print Sf Free Edition - Print & Mail On Demand
Function: The free edition has much functionality, but I have used only 1 feature thus far -- the ability to standardize mailing address information to US Post Office specifications. Experience with the free edition led me to use other offerings from this company.
Support Experience: A few times when I uploaded certain lists, I got an error. This triggered an alert to the publisher who immediately contacted me and resolved the issue. Service has been super from PrintSf for both the free and contracted services/products.
Publisher: Kugamon
App: Account/Contact Address Manager w/Automatic Sync & Update
Function: My latest find (published 7/2/10). Another piece of my toolset for keeping our address data as accurate and up-to-date as possible. This gem updates the shipping address and contact address when the billing address changes, if they had all been the same prior to the billing address change.
Support Experience: Was proactively contacted by the company after I installed the app. I had a suggestion for a further feature (update of contact phone number if account phone number is changed) which is now being considered for a future release!
Publisher: Arrowpointe
App: User Adoption Dashboard
Function: A great dashboard for monitoring user adoption. Can easily be tweaked to meet your exact needs.
Support Experience: While I didn’t need any support when customizing or using the dashboard, this made my list anyway. It’s the only free Arrowpointe app that we use in my organization, but we use other code samples that Scott Hemmeter has contributed on his
blog. For some of those I have needed help with when tweaking and he’s always been extremely responsive and helpful.
My closing piece of advice is to make visiting the site a monthly habit. The AppExchange is a resource that no admin should live without!