My Favorite Salesforce Apps on the AppExchange

In honor of AppExchange’s 10^th year anniversary, I thought I’d share some of my favorite apps for Salesforce. Happy Anniversary AppExchange!

Utility Apps

Field Trip (free)

When you’re looking to do some spring cleaning, this is a great app to turn to. It creates a listing of all standard and custom fields. But the cool part is that it shows you the percentage records that have data in those fields. This can help you identify potential fields that can be cleaned up.

Config Workbook (CWB) (free)

This app is a dream come true for those of you wanting to document your system. It creates an Excel spreadsheet detailing field level security, profiles, page layouts, permission sets, apex code and more. You’ll love this app.

Metadata Glimpser (free)

Ever wish you could identify the differences between your production environment and the sandbox? This app grants that wish. It scans all your classes, triggers, Visualforce pages and objects and reports back a listing of differences. Click on a specify file and it’ll show you a line by line view of the file differences.

Data Management

Enabler4Excel (paid)

If I could only have one app in my arsenal, this would be the app I’d choose. Enabler4Excel is an add-on for Microsoft Excel. It creates a new ribbon that allows you to connect to your Salesforce org and easily extract data, manipulate it, and push it right back up to the cloud. No need for csv files. Need to load data? Open up Excel and push it up. It without doubt makes my admin life easier.

JitterBit Cloud Data Loader (free)

JitterBit is a widely used data loader. If I need to schedule a data loading process, Jitterbit is my choice. This can give you an inexpensive way to load back office data into Salesforce. Setup a nightly export from your ERP and let JitterBit load the file into Salesforce. Pretty simple.

dbAmp (paid)

If your technology group is a “Microsoft shop”, then this tool is a no brainer. dbAmp is a SQL Server tool that replicates all your Salesforce data onto SQL Server and keeps it in sync. Why is that such a big deal? Well if your developers are SQL experts, then they’ll be able to create stored procedure to manipulate or analyze Salesforce data. Or if you need complex reporting that Salesforce isn’t able to do, you can easily leverage Microsoft Reporting Services.

Business Tools

Conga Composer (paid)

When your project requires the need to generate documents or spreadsheets of data, Conga is the app to use. Conga was one of the AppExchange’s first app and they continue to innovate. Conga has one of the best support teams in the industry so when you have questions, they’ll take very good care of you. It also integrates with DocuSign or EchoSign for e-signature support.

eContacts (free)

This is a mobile app that scans a business card and uploads the data into Salesforce. These business card scanner apps are not perfect but this one does a pretty good job.

Vision-e Maps (paid)

There are several good apps in the mapping category. Vision-e has the typical lead, account and contact mapping and trip routing but Vision-e provides the functionality at a significantly lower cost than the competitors in this field.

Timba Surveys (free)

If you need to do basic surveys, this app is worth looking at. It allows you to survey both your Salesforce users and and customers. It’s hard to argue with free.

Gmail Integration

Cirrus Insight (paid)

There are a lot of choices for Gmail to Salesforce integration but Cirrus Insight has been around a long time and so well designed. I trust it and know that when I recommend it to my clients that it will serve them well.

SalesforceIQ Inbox (free)

Okay so this is not an AppExchange app but I’m a big fan. This is a Google Chrome plug-in and also available on your iPhone and Android stores. It’s the app I use for my Gmail inbox. It’s not as full featured as Cirrus but it’s crazy how smart it is with your emails. It will identify potential to-do items for you and even opportunites. Very smart!

Project Management

Agile Accelerator (free)

I’m a big fan of the Agile development methodology. Salesforce has packaged up key pieces of their own internally used app and provided it on AppExchange for all of us to leverage. If you’re working in a team environment, is a great tool to managing all the projects we’re asked to accomplish.