Adam Ady has been using Salesforce for five years.  He started out managing 5 users and is now managing 300+ users, across multiple instances, for 2tor Inc. 2tor Inc. is an online graduate education company, which partners with prestigious research-based institutions such as Georgetown University and their Master's in Nursing program.  He is a Certified Administrator and Certified Sales Cloud Consultant and is currently learning to code in Apex.  Adam thinks it's important to give back to the community so in his spare time he manages a non profit instance for Royal Family Productions. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I currently work on a team of 5 dedicated salesforce.com Administrators and Developers and am responsible for 2 of the 4 (and growing) Unlimited Edition instances.  Managing multiple organizations comes wtih some unique challenges.  The tools an Administrator has can mean the difference between working late on a Friday night or kicking off your weekend early.  Hopefully my favorite AppExchange apps can help you kick your weekend off early!

DupeBlocker by CRMfusion, Inc

I happen to love working with data, and deduplication is actually a hobby of mine, but sadly enough, my company installed DupeBlocker.  Traditionally, deduplication is a necessary and fun chore that falls to Administrators because of the complexity of the database, and the skills required to manipulate large batches of data outside of the system.  DupeBlocker runs very quietly and once set up, requires little or no maintenance.  Once installed, your users can start deduplicating their own dirty data, freeing you up to update those process flow charts you’ve been neglecting.

Email to Case Premium by Internet Creations

We recently started using cases to track our own support issues, but eating your own dogfood, surprisingly, doesn’t always taste good.  Email to Case Premium makes cases much more palatable.  Installation means a new button that allows you to email case contacts while maintaining the conversation thread in the standard case comments related list.  This means that you don’t have to review email, descriptions, case comments, and Chatter if you want to get up to date on a case’s history.  It also has a nifty add-attachment page element that will make non-case merge premium users jealous!

Time Track by American Data Company

This little gem helps me keep track of all of the time I spend assisting my users reset their passwords.  Installing this package nets you a sweet visual force pop-up that you can call forth from any case record.  It works much like a stop watch…but for the cloud.  Recorded durations are input into attached related lists for your reporting convenience.

GroupMaster by Force.com Labs

I’m always interested in anything put out by Force.com Labs. Their AppExchange listings install easily and work as advertised. Managing groups can be a big project for an admin. I once pulled a fire alarm to get out of a big group management project.  Then I found out about GroupMaster.   GroupMaster has a sweet interface that lets you assign users to groups by role, profile, or other group.  It's a great tool for merging Chatter groups.  Now I can give up my life of crime (pulling fire alarms) and focus on being an admin.