In honor of Appy’s First Birthday, our favorite things this week are dedicated to each of our personal favorite apps from the AppExchange. These apps give us that extra magic to keep things running smoothly in the orgs we work in. Happy Birthday, Appy! (Don’t know Appy? She is the mascot of the AppExchange!)
App Name: Trail Tracker – by Trailhead
Why We Use It: Assign, track, and report on Trailhead badges earned by your team via pre-built reports and dashboards to foster a culture of learning at your company.
Why We Love It: Trail Tracker is a powerful tool to encourage friendly competition and learning among users. Trail Tracker automatically syncs Trailhead activity across your org and feeds dashboard components that highlight your most adventurous trailblazers (assuming production org identities are used to earn badges). Combine Trail Tracker with Trailmixes so that your team can flaunt their progress down learning paths customized for them. For bonus points, you can design a competition with prizes for top performers.
Favorited by Kenny
App Name: ChattoMate
Why We Use It: Manage Chatter limits and send notifications and follow conversations based on rules you set for records, users, or groups.
Why We Love It: I absolutely love Chatter as both a communication driver (#obsessed with Working Out Loud) and as a driver of overall user adoption. ChattoMate allows you to help your users follow only the records that bring them the most value. You can write “recipes” that allow: executives to follow all opportunities over a certain dollar amount or in a particular stage; field sales to follow any new record an inside sales professional creates; removing followers on records…the applications are immense and it allows for your Chatter users to really cut the noise out of their Feed!
Favorited by Shannon
App Name: Declarative Lookup Rollup Summaries
Why We Use It: Create rollup summaries using lookup fields instead of just Master-Detail.
Why We Love It: Andy Fawcett, CTO of Financial Force, made the original DLRS in 2015 and continues to work on this magical app, now in its 18th release. DLRS allows admins to create rollup summaries through lookup relationships with purely declarative means while adding great functions like concatenate, count distinct, first, and last to the standard rollup summary options (Avg, Count, Max, Min, Sum). The app is well documented & creates triggers, apex classes, and code coverage through a declarative interface. I find a use case for it on the majority of my projects, it is definitely my favorite Salesforce Tool.
Favorited by Tom
App Name: GridBuddy
Why We Use It: To improve productivity, data quality, and the user-experience by configuring grid views of records to match your business processes.
Why We Love It: The day I “met” GridBuddy was love at first download. GridBuddy lets you see lots of related records in an editable Excel-like format. It is super simple to set up and get started, you can set up tabs that take you right to a specific grid and begin working. Set up filters on records, mass edit them, add new child records and more, all from a single screen. And… you get to avoid all the screen refreshes. Tasks that took me hours could be done in minutes instead because I did not have to wait for a page to load, click edit, click save, and then move on to the next record. Even for a NPO, the cost-benefit analysis was easy!
Favorited by Kristi
App Name: Conga Composer
Why We Use It: Easily generate documents based on Salesforce records and reports – no more manually creating invoices, agreements, or business reviews.
Why We Love It: Conga Composer eliminates the manual creation of documents and helps me enforce my “if it’s not in Salesforce it didn’t happen” mantra. The back-end of this app takes the reporting magic we admins work and brings data from Salesforce records into one place. There’s no pulling this report to tie it to that report to put together something pretty for the boss – Conga just merges the details together and brings time and money back to your business. While it does require a little bit of knowledge on creating templates, there is a template builder that is drag-and-drop. When you create your first button and then generate your first template full of data from three or four related objects, you’ll understand my glee!
Favorited by Becky