Perspectives on Salesforce.com

I had the privilege of being asked to present to the San Diego Salesforce User Group this past Friday.  The topic for the day was Appexchange Applications, Tools, and Components that you can download for Free!

I presented on a number of Arrowpointe Products as well as some 3rd party ones that, over the years, I have come to really appreciate.  I included apps that are both free and ones I consider well worth the money.  The list is not exhaustive and there are lots of good candidates.  For 3rd party apps, I tried to pick ones that were useful to all Salesforce Customers and not ones that were focused on specific business processes or technologies to be integrated with.  That pares down the list quite a bit.

If you are interested, you can download my slides.  For each app I presented on, there are links on the slides to learn more about them.

Thank you San Diego User Group for being a great group to present to and I hope to make it down that way again soon!

Salesforce conducts a security audit for all AppExchange applications on an annual basis.  I am pleased to report that Arrowpointe Maps has once again passed this review and has been certified for another year.

Evernote is a very cool and useful application for taking notes, saving web clippings and archiving images that represent notes (sometimes its faster to just take a picture).  One really great thing about it is that it does OCR on you content (event the text in your images!) and makes it all searchable.  I use it all the time and love it.  It can be a bit of a novelty, but if you decide to really use it, you can get a lot of utility out of it.

What if you could save your Notes right into Salesforce?  You can (only as Documents for now)!  Coming soon is integration with standard and custom objects, which would let you do things like take a picture of a business card and import it into an Account/Contact combo.  Maybe take a picture of a whitboard of notes and save it as an Activity.

Steve Buikhuizen has created the Note Wizard application.  It’s definitely worth looking into.  It’s an integration with Salesforce and Evernote all running on Amazon EC2 and S3!

• Main page for the project
• Videos that explain a lot
• AppExchange listing (a private listing for now. This is linked to on the About page of the main site.)

Good work, Steve!

The demandblog has been posting some AppExchange application reviews recently.  They did a good one for ActevaRSVP, who has a pretty impressive product.  See their review at http://demandbase.typepad.com/demand/2008/10/dreamforce-prev.html.

Note: ActevaRSVP is a current advertiser on this blog.

Lifehacker (one of my favorite blogs) has a post today about YubNub. If you don’t know what YubNub is, they bill themselves as

A (social) command line for the web

Basically, it lets you use their site as a way to run commands on other sites. To use it, you start with the command and then follow it with the context. For example, you could type “g arrowpointe” to search Google for “Arrowpointe”, “weather 60601″ to get the weather in Chicago. There are literally 1000s of options and it’s not all about searching. It is a way to avoid going to every individual site to do things. It’s pretty interesting once you start messing around with it. I can’t say I’ll be using it every day, but I could see how one could master it and get quite a bit more productive. I added the Firefox Search Plugin for it to start using it and see what I think.

A cool feature to it is that anyone can create new commands. To do so, you go here, give it a name and then put in the URL the command should use with placeholders to drop in the context of your command. To try it out, I created the command apex that searches the AppExchange.

To use it, go to YubNub (or use your Firefox YubNub search engine) and type “apex WhatToSearchFor” (e.g. “apex arrowpointe” will search the AppExchange for Arrowpointe’s applications). I will be using this one. It’s one less step to going to the AppExchange site first and then searching.