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Salesforce customers are using apps to make work easier every day.
Given the power of apps it's only natural that some people develop a
special fondness and become full-fledged app experts. We call these
folks "AppExchange All-Stars."
Please welcome Justin Edelstein (@JustEdelstein) to our AppExchange All-Star community. Justin
was one of the first 500 certified administrators and advanced
administrators. He also boasts certifications for developer, and sales
and service cloud consultant. He is a co-founder and the CIO of Arkus,
Inc. a salesforce.com consulting partner. He has spoken at Dreamforce
dating back to DF '08 and at Cloudforce events in NYC since before they
were even called Cloudforce.
As
a consulting partner of salesforce.com I have to solve a variety of
problems from all different types of businesses. From fortune 100
financial institutions to 5 person development teams at a nonprofit, I’ve found that the AppExchange has an app for almost every need. We
are always looking for partner solutions on the AppExchange to augment
and enhance our implementations for our clients as well as for use
within our own instance. Here are a few that have made a difference for
both Arkus and for our clients:
Cirrus Insight by Cirruspath, Inc
At
Arkus we are a Mac shop and a Gmail shop so when it comes to out of the
box integration between our email client (Apple Mail) and Salesforce we
don’t get as much love as PC users who leverage Outlook. This is where
Cirrus Insight comes in. With Cirrus Insight we get the shiny Outlook
side panel that was released in Winter ‘13 right there in context in our
Gmail inbox. With this panel we get contextual data around the emails
that we receive from Contacts. We can see recent activities,
opportunities, and cases that are related to the Contact that sent us
the email. We can also hover over other recipients of the email in the
cc line of the email to see their contextual information. The fun
doesn’t stop there, we additionally can use send and add buttons and
quick create buttons to create Contacts or Leads from email recipients.
With Cirrus Insight we Mac and Gmail users don’t feel left out of the
email client integration party. Install is a breeze and you are up and
running with the integration in about one minute flat.
The Permissioner by Arkus, Inc.
Nobody
loves Permission Sets more than I do, ok, maybe @atorman, but it’s a
close race. The ability to assign such granular permissions at a user
level is something that I had been waiting years for. Last year when
Permission Sets launched I was super excited until I had to start
assigning them to users. I quickly realized that going from user to user
and clicking edit on their related Permission Sets list was going to
take a lot of time - especially if I wanted to assign a Permission Set
to more than five users. In comes: The Permissioner. This app makes
assigning and revoking Permissions Sets to a massive amount of users at
one time extremely simple. A really clean search based user interface
allows me to assign/revoke Permissions Sets so fast and at great scale.
ZapIt (Scan Entry) by Scout
Whether
you handle inventory management or scan attendees’ badges at an event,
creating records in Salesforce with Zapit is laser gun fast. ZapIt
installs into Salesforce and allows users to shoot their barcode
scanners at any barcodes, and create a record in Salesforce for any
standard or custom object. Barcodes are actually a font type and most
USB scanners act as keyboards, so it makes scanning IDs or QR codes
super easy and has a variety of uses. Recently I used this product with a
client to enable them to track attendance of their students at events.
The team at Scout is also able to create custom logic to execute when a
scan occurs, making ZapIt even more powerful.
Donation Split by Cloud for Good
I
have been helping nonprofits optimize Salesforce.com for several years
and over that time the Nonprofit Starter Pack (NPSP) - a set of packages
taylored to fit the nonprofit business model - has come a long way.
The features are pretty slick and with every release they roll out a new
solution for a common nonprofit business process (i.e., schedule/write
off payments, batch donation entry, etc).
While I’m a huge fan of the
NPSP packages, I find that 95% of the organizations that I work with
that use Salesforce for managing their fundraising and development have a
requirement not yet met by any solutions in the NPSP - the need to
track funding allocations (i.e., when a donation/grant gets committed,
what program is the money going to). Cloud for Good has built a pretty
good app called Donation Split. It’s free, easy to install, and will
meet the needs of most nonprofits looking to track their allocations.
What I love: You can allocate donations to Fiscal Years and to Programs
and then access that data via pre-built dashboards. What I don’t love:
You can only allocate to program and fiscal year and nothing beyond
that. For example, if you are a national organization you might have the
same program in multiple cities. You might want to allocate funds to
the “Youth Services” program at the “Chicago” site for “FY12”. With
Donation Split you are limited to two “buckets” and no more. You could
do Chicago FY12, or Youth Services FY12, but not all three. Even with
this limitation this product is a great free add-on to the NPSP to help
fundraising teams more accurately report on their donation data.
Check out also some of our veteran AppExchange All-Stars:
Tracy Reid, Merx Networks Inc.
