10 Free Apps to Extend the Power of Salesforce

Hi everyone and welcome to today's webinar where we're walking through 10 free apps to extend the power of Salesforce. My name is Hugh Minson and I'm a product marketer on the app cloud team here at Salesforce. And we're today in the Salesforce head office in San Francisco, I'm joined by.

Hello everyone, my name is Abhishek Jatul Bedi and because that's a tongue twister, I also go by 8C. I am an app cloud solution engineer here at Salesforce.

Thank you very much for your time today. To start with, we will be making some forward looking statements. Please make your purchasing decisions based on the products that we have currently available. And a quick agenda for today. We're going to touch on the app cloud and how the app exchange fits within that. We're going to walk through nine free apps and have a demo of the 10th free app with AC selecting an app from the AppExchange and showing you how to install it. And then we are going to do a Q and A. So I would encourage you please to put forward any questions you have. You can do that by selecting the Ask a question button. And it would also be great if you could provide some feedback by clicking the Rate this button after the webinar. If you are asked any additional content, we have a link to the AppExchange and we also have an app guide and gallery which is downloadable from the left hand panel. And if you wish to revisit any part of today's webinar, we'd encourage you to do so by clicking the Live and Recorded button. Okay, let's get into it. So the new era currently is introducing three major challenges. Firstly, there's the issue of legacy technology. Often organizations are building custom solutions that result in siloed data. You may have a lot of Excel spreadsheets that you use within your organization, or potentially you're even using pen and paper. Yes, that counts as technology to record your data. And these are really systems of record. And so the challenge is how you move from systems of record to systems of engagement. As we all know, there's a massive talent shortage currently. It's really hard to hire talented developers. And even once you do hire them, it's even harder to retain them. And app complexity in the app revolution, currently customers and employees are expecting rich and engaging mobile experiences. The bar has really been risen here. Why choose AppCloud? Well, the answer is simple. We're the number one cloud app development platform. It's not just Us saying this. Gartner last year also came out with putting us in the magic quadrant for app development as well. You can build any app fast, whether that be an employee productivity app built on force, where you develop components to be able to reuse with point and click ease or turning to Heroku for those customer engagement facing apps using any modern language and architecture. And you can also turn to the number one business app marketplace, which is the focus of today's talk. And all of this is built upon our trusted platform, which really allows for speed and agility. But what if you don't need to.

Develop apps from scratch?

Well, in that case you can turn to the App Exchange where we have over 2,800 pre built apps. It's the world's number one business app marketplace. I like to think of the analogy of the sandwich bar. If you go into a sandwich bar, you can select ingredients from the display and make your own sandwich, or you can purchase a sandwich off the shelf that's already been pre made. There's over three and a half million installs of these apps and we have some two million developers out there in the ecosystem. And it's this ecosystem that we encourage you to tap into because we have partner apps that have been produced by third party customers who are building apps on force and that can either plug directly into your Salesforce instance as a result of being built on Force, or they can plug into your Salesforce instance through APIs. Examples of this are companies like Dropbox or Docusign or Evernote, and these are free or paid apps. Then we have Labs apps. These apps are built on force by Salesforce employees and these are all free. So these aren't necessarily Salesforce products per se, but they are examples of iterations of apps that can be built and plugged straight into your Salesforce instance on top of force through the App Exchange. It's really important to choose the right app for your organization though. If you look at the breakdown of apps on the App Exchange, we have 56% of those are paid partner apps, 29% of free partner apps, and about 15% of these free Labs apps, which is going to be the focus of today's talk. What's more, these apps are for every department, whether it be operations or finance or supply chain management of marketing. You can really select apps that fit your needs. Today though, given that this is a quick webinar, we're really going to focus on apps from three main areas being hr, IT and sales support.

So let's get into it.

We're going to start with HR apps which really help onboard, engage and educate your workforce. And if you think about an HR department, I wonder what the budget for apps in your HR department is. It might not be much. And what's more, I think about the mandate of an HR department which is really to engage your workforce and keep them motivated and tuned into what they are doing. So here the first app is Shadower. This allows you to easily collect mentors and mentees within your organisation. This is fantastic for sharing information within your teams, building comradery amongst your workforce and really sharing that knowledge within your organization. Surveyforce is an app that allows you to create, send and capture customer feedback. In the era of putting the customer first, this really enables your workforce to be completely plugged in with your customers needs and up to speed with the challenges they're facing on a daily basis. Almond is an app which enables you to create and assign your staff gamified learning activities. I like to think of the example where you're releasing products or services that are new and you need your employees to be up to speed with what's happening with those products or services. You could create using this app some simple quizzes and tasks to bring your entire workforce up to speed with those new releases. Moving to some IT apps which is all about empowering your IT department to innovate faster. The first one here is Agile Accelerator. This enables you to manage backlogs, sprints, user stories, defects and more. We actually use this app internally. Our IT department is engaged in agile best practices. So we're using this as a scrum management tool and it's a fantastic way of facilitating best practice development. App Development Governance is an app which enables everyone within your organization to put forward ideas for tech improvements. So not just reserving that to the IT department. This is a great way to have everyone a part of the innovation within your organization and to enable your IT department to prioritize those requests as well. And Milestone PM is an app which is more broad than the Agile Accelerator. It includes things like the ability to track projects, milestones, tasks and expense budgets. Moving to some sales support apps, as we know we are Salesforce and sales is a big part of what we do and this is about increasing employee and competitive visibility. Starting with Strategic Account Planning. This allows various departments in your organization to collaborate together to start penetrating those strategic accounts. So maybe you've got a marketing team that needs to work with a sales team or even a finance team to really open up that account that you're targeting. As an organisation, know youw Enemy is about tracking your competitors, presentations and news and tweets all in the one spot. It's a great way to keep your finger on the pulse with what your competitors are doing out there in the market. An org chart this is a personal favorite of mine. This enables you to view managers and peers within your organization and how that fits from a structural point of view. And I like to think of this app in a sales support setting where you as a salesperson may need to bring various people into a deal. So how do you shortcut that information and find out who in your organization would be a fantastic person to bring on a particular deal? So there's a brief walkthrough of those nine apps and now I'd like to hand it over to AC who's going to do a demo of our 10th app which is called Simple Visit Reports.

Thank you Hugh. Now, before we dive into the details of the tent free app, which is the Simple Visit Reports app, I want to give everyone a quick tour of the Salesforce AppExchange. You can access the AppExchange by going to appexchange.salesforce.com when you come here, you land on the home page. If you're new to the AppExchange, you can go to this link and learn more about it. There are some exciting announcements up here. The AppExchange celebrated its 10th birthday last week, so you have 10 years worth of awesomeness and innovation available in the Salesforce App Exchange. In the center panel here, you'll see some featured apps, the most popular apps that a lot of our customers and developers are installing. On the left hand pane you'll see apps that are categorized by theme, by department and industries. And there's also filters that you can use to sort out apps based on certain features on the price of the apps, whether they're free, whether they're paid, or they're for nonprofits. Yes, there's apps for nonprofits also in here. The addition compatibility. If you already know the name of the app, you can just go up here and type in the name of the app. In our case, this is a Simple Wizard Reports app. I'm going to get the search results here. We get a couple of search results. If I want to know what each app does, I can simply hover over this tile and get a brief description of the app. We also see a lightning ready badge on the Simple Wizard Reports app. So I'm going to click into the app. This is the app that we want now, the Simple Wizard Reports app provides you with a simple and effective way of tracking and analyzing information about customer visits that your sales reps made. Now you can collect a lot of information like what was the goal of the visit, what type of visit was it? Was it a prospecting or up selling visit or was it a training or a courtesy call? And this app is built entirely using the declarative tool set of the Force.com platform. There was no code involved in building this app. You can see some more information here. It's lightning ready, the edition compatibility and when you scroll down you see the overview or brief description. You see some screenshots, different screenshots of the app and you can also see what other customers installed besides this app. I can go into a more detailed description of this app. I see some more technical details like the package details, the components, the additions, and we also see that there's a setup guide right here. You'll view the setup guide once you've installed the app. You can also see reviews that other customers and developers are leaving here. This has a 4.7 star rating, so it's generally good feedback about the app and then some more detail about the provider. The provider in this case is Salesforce Labs and Salesforce Labs, as you mentioned, is an initiative at Salesforce where Salesforce employees can exchange the apps that they're creating with the App Exchange community. You can see more apps from this provider. If I scroll down, you'll see there are 300 of these apps, so lots and lots of free apps there. I encourage you to definitely check these out. Now what do I have to do to install this app? It's as simple as clicking the Get it now button. So when I click on get it now it will ask me to log into the App Exchange if I'm not already logged in. So I'm going to log into the App Exchange now. It is going to use my Salesforce credentials. I'm already logged into my org on another tab so it's going to use those credentials. Once I'm logged in, it will ask me whether I want to install this in production or in Sandbox. Now unless this is a file or developer org, you never want to install something directly in production unless you want to cause a nightmare and have a lot of phone calls coming your way. You want to install this in Sandbox, test it out, make sure everything's working okay, customize the code or the configuration as per your requirements for the purpose of this demo. Since this is a trial org, I'm going to install this in production once I click on that and present it with terms and conditions. I can also verify the information about the. Org that I'm installing this into the username that is being used. If this is a free or paid app, and I can access the setup guide again by clicking here, I'm going to click on the checkbox and confirm and install. At this point, I'm being asked to log in again into the Org. Once I log in, I am taken to the app install screen and here I am presented with a couple of options. The first option talks about what happens if there is a naming conflict with certain components that might already exist in your Org. You could block the install, or you could rename the conflicting components in your package.

Now, you have to be really careful.

With the second option because this might cause behaviors that you were not expecting because you renamed certain components and there were dependencies on that component. You can then choose the audience for the initial install you want to install for admins only. You want it to install for specific profiles, so you could scroll down and select the profiles that this would be visible to initially. You can always go back and change this information for this demo. I'm going to install this for all our users now. While this is installing, you can also see the components of this app. So we can see there's a custom object involved. There are fields in here, so we have some fields that we're creating on standard objects, so you can ship that with your app too. Some custom fields for the custom object, a lot of reports and dashboards, and there's also a custom tab. Sometimes these installs, depending on the size of the app, can take long, but you can still continue to work and you'll get a notification email when the app is installed. You can go back and check it out. I'm going to click on Done here. When I click on Done, I'm taken to the Install packages page in the setup menu. Now, we just installed an app, but you would find them in the Install packages section. And this is to differentiate it from the apps that you're creating on your own. And apps are basically distributed. When you're distributing them, they're distributed as either managed packages or unmanaged packages. Managed packages are targeted at ISVs and partners. It protects their intellectual property. You will get all the functionality, but you might not have access to all the components in that package, specifically the code. But the advantage of the managed package is that you can seamlessly upgrade them. If there's a newer version of the app, you can simply click a button and Install it. Unmanaged packages are what Hugh was talking about initially. They're usually free, but you get access to all the code, all the components. You can build around it. You can extend it to customize it to a use case. If I want to visit the components again, I can click into the Simple Widget Reports app. I can view the components or view dependencies or uninstall this package. If there's any conflicts, it would not let you in any dependencies, it would not let you uninstall this package. I can use the components again. So the app installation was successful. There's some setup that we need to do now. So if we go to the setup guide that was provided, you'll see that there's some steps that says in the classic view, you could add the tab. You could also go to the account layout and add some fields that were supplied with this package. So it tells us to do last visit date and number of days, and it also asks us to add the related list for visit reports to the account page layout. There were also some dashboards and reports that were installed as part of this app. So if I go into reports and I go to all folders and I click Simple Wizard Reports, I can see all of these reports that were created as part of the app installation. If I go into Dashboards, let me go into all folders again. There's a Simple Wizard Reports dashboard folder I can see when I open this dashboard. Dashboard appears, but there is no data in here, so we don't see how what kind of view you would get with that dashboard. Also, if we do the setup changes, we could see what the data would look like in the context of an account. Now, I don't want to bore all of you by doing those configuration changes and making you sit through a data loading exercise. So what I did was I created another demo org and I installed the app and loaded a bunch of dummy data so that we can all get an idea of what these dashboards would look like. So now I'm going to switch to the other Org and this is what your dashboards will look like. So you can see there's a lot of useful information here. There's visit reports, breakdown by reps and by type. I'm the only rep in this case. And so you can see what kind of visits I made. You can see the top visits being made, the visit reports in a particular week, the competitor presence. So you can also track competition. You can extend this, obviously, but if you're doing especially a prospecting or Upselling call and there's mention of competition, you can track that information as well. Now let's quickly take a look at how I've already made the configuration changes. So let's quickly take a look at how this would look in the context of an account. So I'm going to access the United Partners account. When the page loads and I scroll down, I've already added the related list. When I scroll down, I'll see my visit reports associated with this account. When I click into this, I can see the details. This is a scheduled follow up. This is the goal of the wizard, the goal of the next visit, the competitor information, and if you had any notes or attachments here, you could upload that as well. To go back to the account page and look at the details, I added the two fields that were available through this package. The number of days since the last visit to the last visit date was on the 18th. This information was automatically calculated and the Force.com platform is a really, really powerful platform. And one of the best features of the platform is all the configuration changes that I made for the account layout are instantly available on the SalesforceOne mobile app. If I go into accounts here and I click United Partners here, I go to Related and scroll down, I can see the same Visa reports on my mobile device. So this is really powerful. You can extend this. Since this is an unmanaged package, you can extend it, build more reports, build code around this, build processes around this. And that was the demo of the simple wizard reports. And we just saw how easily you can find an app, how easily you can install it, and with very little or no effort or configuration, you can start using it not only on your desktop but also on your mobile devices. So now back to you, Hugh.

Thanks very much, ac. I think as you said, that's just a great example of how simple and fast it can be to find these apps and plug them straight in and start playing with them. There's an example here I'd like to touch on of one of our customers called Akamai, who has used nine AppExchange apps to accelerate their demand generation. These apps admittedly are paid apps from the AppExchange, but I still think it's a great example of how they had a business need around their sales processes and how they turned to the app exchange to find fast solutions to that. So they two stats. So they're a leading provider of cloud services and two stats I like, firstly the fact that they improved lead engagement by 50% amongst their sales team and Also, that same sales team decreased downtime by 25%. So a really cool example of a business need. Finding apps to solve that need and quickly solving it. And these 10 apps we'll walk through today are the Labs apps that run on Force. As AC said, there's over 300 of these on the App Exchange. What we did though is we actually took a look at those 300 and we selected 50 that we liked and boiled them down into this list here. This list is in a slide that if you're an existing customer of Salesforce, you can reach out to your account executive and they'll be happy to send you a copy of this slide. It's interesting because we've made them hyperlinks so you can click on these apps and go straight through the App Exchange and learn more. A couple of examples I like. For example, within marketing there's an events management app which could be fantastic to help your marketing team run their events. Within operations, there's an approval central app where you can have your managers see all the approvals they need to make in the one spot. And I'm not going to go through all 50, but definitely encourage you to reach out to your AE to source that document. And just before we head into the Q and A, definitely check out Salesforce's trailhead. This is where you can learn everything about our products through fun and interactive trails. It's getting a great response so far. It's a really quick way to upskill and learn more about these solutions. So now if you haven't already, please feel free to ask us some questions and we'll just take some time now to go through and answer those. So one question we had here was once I've installed these apps, can I improve upon them? The answer to that one firstly is yes, definitely you can. These Labs apps are templates where you can increase the functionality and customize to your org as you see fit. And yeah, I figure.

Yeah. And there's one more question that says I am a user but not on the admin list. Can I install an app for a single user myself under Install specific profile? Now, we would encourage you to do it in your developer sandbox if you have one. Usually if it's a more controlled environment, you will probably not have the ability to install it. But if you sign up for a free Developer edition Org, if you have your own developer sandbox Org and you have the right administrative capabilities, you could install that app. Also, there's a really good question which says is there a way to install apps for specific users which are not visible to other users. So while I was doing my demo, you did see we have the option of installing apps for specific profiles just for admins or for all users. This can be configured even after you've installed the app. You can go back and revisit that assignment.

And there's a question here as well. Were all of the apps presented available in Professional Edition?

Yeah. And so every app that you see there has an edition compatibility list. So you can go to the app and it will show you what apps or what kind of editions it is compatible with.

Yeah. And there's a question as well. Is there any announcement as to when Salesforce Health Cloud will be available to try? Yeah, look, we will have updates on that coming. Currently, it still is a work in progress.

There's also another question. Do these apps work on mobile automatically or do I need to do a lot of work? So a lot of our partner apps are optimized for the mobile experience. A lot of the standard free apps that you saw, if they're standard objects, if there's not a lot of coding or customization that has gone into them like we just saw, I installed it. And it is readily available on your mobile devices. So depending on the type of app, there might be some work that you need to do, but mostly apps would be optimized for the mobile experience.

And another question, how long are these free apps valid for?

The apps are valid for as long as your org is valid for. There's no validity on the apps. There might be upgrades that you can go in and check for updates, especially if they're managed apps. You will probably get updates where you can easily go click on a button and install those apps and upgrade them.

Yeah, and there's someone there asking, is there an app to send text messages from an email list? Off the top of my head, I don't think we have Labs apps for that functionality. So those apps that are created by Salesforce, but I definitely encourage you to check out some of our partner apps that I'm very sure have functionality around text messaging. Just reading through some more of these questions here.

I do not have the Salesforce install anywhere. How can I play around with the App Exchange products? So you don't need to install Salesforce, you just go to developer.salesforce.com, sign up for free Developer Edition. Org and you can go to the App Exchange, then log in with your credentials, install all these free apps, or if there's a trial available for a paid app, and play around with Them. Is Milestones pm, an alternative to Microsoft Project Milestone. PM is a great application. There are a lot of capabilities here, but again, it's a Labs app and there are certain features you'll find it will give you a template to start. You can customize it as long as you want. Is it an alternative Microsoft project? That depends on the requirements and the use case that you have.

There's a question here as well. What happens if there are bugs in these apps? These free Labs apps? Yeah, I mean, these apps have once again been produced by Salesforce employees. They're not Salesforce products per se. So as they're templates, you can either look to solve those yourself or. Yeah, you can.

There's no official support for them, but these apps are used heavily by a lot of our customers and a lot of developers on our developer community. So I would encourage you, if you ever find a problem or a question on these apps, reach out to the developer community or the success community. And we have a lot of awesome people on there that will help you with your questions.

And I'd also like to reinforce there the fact that this is an ecosystem, so definitely take part in the ecosystem. You can rate these apps. You can provide feedback on the apps. As you said, if there are Labs apps in particular, we'll endeavor to respond to those.

Now another question is, do these apps require sales or service licenses? No, they don't always require sales or service licenses. You can also buy Force.com licenses where you don't need to have sales or service functionality. You can just start building on the platform and install them.

Yeah, I think we'll just leave it there for questions. If you have any further questions, you've got our email addresses there. Feel free to reach out to us and ask. Go. We'd be delighted to respond to you in person. Thank you very much for your time today. Would encourage you please to provide your feedback. We're always endeavoring to provide the most relevant content to you and to meet your expectations. So thank you very much for your time and all the best.