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 Jason Atwood to our AppExchange All-Star community.  Jason  is the co-founder and COO of Arkus a Salesforce.com consulting partner.  He is also a Salesforce MVP and frequent Dreamforce speaker.  In his spare time he is the co-host of CloudFocus a weekly podcast about Salesforce and other cloud happenings. Jason  has been using Salesforce since 2000, and is one of the first 500 certified administrators.  Jason is a cloud trailblazer:

"It has been a long road of using Salesforce and the platform only gets better, but there are always features and functionality that don’t make it into the core. This is where the AppExchange can be so powerful by extending the platform by leaps and bounds. Here are four of the ones I use every single day, no lie."

Here are Jason's app picks:

Appirio Cloud Sync for Google Apps by Appirio

As someone who pays a lot of attention to my “hard landscape” of obligations (my calendar), the ability to see all aspects of my life in one place is critical. As a Mac user, iCal holds my personal, family and sports teams calendars and it is Appirio to the rescue with an application that syncs all of my Salesforce calendar events through Google down to my iCal. With this two way sync, I can view things on any mobile device, or within Salesforce, and know it is all up to date.

Compliance Locker by Arkus

Chatter can be many things -  from a collaboration tool to a replacement for email.  But there are no restrictions on what can be deleted by the users and which can make it hard when there are governance requirements: enter the Compliance Locker.  Compliance Locker captures all of the chatter, comments, files and can even block "blacklisted" words from being used. Want things emailed off to a compliance inbox? You can do it. It does all that and the cost is free so enjoy. Okay, that gets the shameless plug out of the way, let’s move on to some others.

Salesforce Mobile Dashboards by Force.com Labs

Reports and dashboards are a wonderful feature of Salesforce but sometimes we get caught up in all of the other things we can do in a browser and dashboards become the last thing to check in on. A mobile view of something can sometimes make it more accessible, easier to drill into or just part of your daily commute. Using Salesforce Mobile Dashboards has become one of my favorite ways of keeping up to date with the goings on in my company, with a mobile twist. A swipe here, a tap there and I am getting personal with my analytics and capturing takeaways. I sometimes like to mix in a little ESPN Sports Center and dashboard viewing on my iPad mini as the productivity cocktail of choice. Cheers.

Conga Composer by AppExtremes

 If I could wave my magic MVP wand and give everyone a free license to one application on the AppExchange, it would be Conga Composer (Compliance Locker is already free). Want to get data out of Salesforce and into structured documents or templates? Want to build customized tear sheets or proposals based on any data? Want to let Excel do the heavy lifting with pre-configured formulas and macros? AppExtremes has your answer in Conga Composer. Basically the swiss army knife of document creation from data within Salesforce that can be configured and extended into any business process. Just an amazing tool with functionality as deep as their support is great. 

Check out also some of our veteran AppExchange All-Stars:

Tim McDonald

Joel Purrier

Tracy Reid