Cloudy's Favorite Apps: Apsona

Have you ever wished you could import and export all of your salesforce.com data without firing up an external application or digging out your security token?

Have you ever encountered the limits of Salesforce.com reporting, wished that you could create more sophisticated reporting filters, or gotten frustrated while managing a list of custom report types?

How much time would you save if you could perform inline-editing on a whole list of records, without clicking into each one individually?

What if you could realize all of these functions and more with a single inexpensive app?

Apsona is one of Cloudy's favorite AppExchange apps, with such varied and powerful functionality that it can benefit any organization. What's more, nonprofits have access to 10 free licenses! 

Cloudy recently created an awesome report for a nonprofit client, allowing them to see which of their donors contributed to last year's matching grant Campaign, but did not contribute to the same Campaign this year. This insight will enable them to do a targeted and informed "ask" of those invested donors for this year's matching grant challenge!  The information on how to create this report using nested filters was right on the Apsona website:

The Apsona Website has lots of eye-opening use-cases and tutorials like this one!

Surely you are already considering the possibilities, but here are even more exciting ideas to ponder:

-Create Exception Reports: ie. Show all Accounts WITHOUT Opportunities
-Quickly change record ownership en mass.
-Import into multiple objects.
-Cleanse and import data in a single, integrated process.

Visit this page for some short, informative demos to see how powerful yet simple Apsona can be: Apsona Demos on the AppExchange 

If you would like help evaluating this App for your salesforce.com, installing it, or creating your first custom reports, CONTACT US!


Read Cloudy's reviews of other popular Apps:
Form Assembly
Conga Composer
Flip Top Social Profiles
Dupe Catcher
Rollup Helper

Cloudy's Favorite Apps: DupeCatcher

The number one Salesforce.com data quality complaint at most organizations is duplicate accounts and contacts.  Without safeguards in place, it can be all too easy to add duplicate records.  When this problem reaches a critical threshold, is it impossible to trust your data and make the daily decisions that depend on it. 

Salesforce.com experts and developers have many strategies, tools, and apps to address this common issue, including proper search technique for users and good matching criteria for data uploads.  The third strategy used by many companies who are winning the battle against "dupes" is DupeCatcher from Symphonic Source.  This simple, free app stops dupes on their way in, based on rules that you define.  

If you have never installed an AppExchange app in your Salesforce.com org, DupeCatcher is a great first choice.  Start the process by going to the AppExchange listing and clicking the green "Get it now" button.  After you follow the step-by-step directions to install it in your org, you will find you have a new listing for Dupecatcher in the App menu drop-down in the upper right corner of your Salesforce.com.  If you click on it, you will have a new view of the collection of tabs that comprise the DupeCatcher App.  To start blocking dupes in your org only requires two steps:

Step 1: Create a Filter
On the "DupeCatcher Filters" tab, click "New" to create a new filter.  From the drop-downs, select whether the filter will apply to Contacts, Accounts, or Leads and define the action you want to occur when a duplicate is detected.  For instance, do you want the duplicate to be completely blocked, or just display a warning to the user?

Step 2: Define the Filter Rules
Once you have saved your filter, it is time to define the duplicate-matching criteria.  On the filter record, scroll down the the DupeCatcher Filter Rules related list and click the "New DupeCatcher Filter Rule" button.  You will probably want to add several rules to have a well defined filter.  

Here is an example of a good set of rules for one contact filter:

Resources:
DupeCatcher on the AppExchange <--Go here to download to your Salesforce.com org
www.DupeCatcher.com <--For more information and resources about this app
Cloudy's favorite: Quick-Start Guide from DupeCatcher
Cloudy's Step-by-Step Direction to install an app

For more of Cloudy's advise about Dirty Data:
Clean ALL the Data!!! Part I
Clean ALL the Data!!! Part II

If you would like help setting up DupeCatcher in your org, if you are struggling with duplicates and need help cleaning up the mess, or if you would like more resources and training on how to effectively manage your data, please Contact Us!

More of Cloudy's Favorite Apps:
FormAssembly
Rollup Helper
Conga Composer
FlipTop

Salesforce.com for Nonprofits - The sky is the limit!

Last week Cloudy explained a little bit about the Salesforce.com Foundation and how it supports Nonprofit and Higher Education organizations by providing ten free Salesforce.com user licenses.  

What could your organization do with those ten free licenses?

-Build deeper relationships with your partners, donors, clients, and volunteers.  Salesforce allows you to see all your related information and interactions in one place, including donation history, emails sent, phone calls logged, events attended, relationships and affiliations recorded, and any custom information you collect.  This 360 degree view of your relationships is invaluable as your team works to partner with donors and volunteers, and to better serve your clients!

-Manage your donation and grant cycle, tracking your “asks,” pledged money, and received donations, with a full view of your data relating to each donor.  Standardize the donation process, see which campaigns and events are most effective, and analyze your donation pipeline with custom reports and graphs.  Automate some of your most common tasks, such as Thank You emails and receipts.

-Integrate your email, Quickbooks, event management, or other systems, and eliminate double-data-entry once and for all!

-Use Chatter to tap into the knowledge of your entire organization.  See what your teammates are working on as they add comments to records you are following.  Get a real-time feed of updates on the items you care about send right to your phone, using the Chatter Mobile app.

-Create reports and charts that give everyone at your organization the information they need to make educated decisions.  Your charts and reports will update automatically as data flows into place; you don’t have to keep creating them!  Executives, board members, program staff, and even volunteers can each see just the information they need.

-Check out the Salesforce AppExchange and click “Nonprofits” under “Industry Solutions” to see some of the Apps that have been designed specially for you.  A Salesforce App is simply a way of adding features and functions to your Salesforce.com; many great Apps are free, and many more offer significant discounts to Non Profits.


Read Cloudy's previous post for a little more about Salesforce.com and how it relates to nonprofits.

Here are Cloudy's reviews of a some salesforce apps that are being used by a few nonprofits he knows:
Conga Composer
FormAssemby

For an hour of free consulting for your nonprofit, contact us!

Cloudy's Favorite Apps: FlipTop Social Profiles

If you are using Salesforce to track your contacts and leads, you already know what a great tool it is for getting a detailed view of the the people, records, and relationships that are important to you.  When you are preparing to call or meet one of your clients or potential customers, one look at their record in Salesforce provides the information you need to have a more personal and up-to-date interaction.  The only thing that is missing is an easy way to view the public social media presence of your contact.  Sure, Salesforce provides the social media links at the top of the page, but often they lead to dead ends, and you have no way to know where the useful information might lie until you click on all five links!

FlipTop Social Profiles, available in a free version on the AppExchange, provides a snapshot of your contact or lead's public social media presence right on their record.  It makes a match using the email on the record and displays a photo and links to Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts.  Of course, the matching only works if the email in your records is the one that your leads or contact use for their social media accounts, and if they have made their photos and profiles publicly searchable.

If tracking the social media presence of your contacts and leads is part of your toolkit for nurturing business relationships, by all means give FlipTop a try!

Click hear to read about why FlipTop is Paul Selway's favorite free social media App!

If you would like help evaluating or installing FlipTop in your Salesforce org, Click Here.


Read Cloudy's reviews of other popular Apps:
Conga Composer
Form Assembly

Cloudy Cumulus is part of Redpath Consulting Group, based in Minneapolis, MN (c) 2012

Cloudy's Favorite Apps: FormAssembly

Do you collect information from clients via website forms, through surveys, or from emailed questionnaires?  What do you do with all that information?  Often, companies are manually uploading this collected data to Salesforce.com, or worse, just letting it sit in disparate spreadsheets and folders.

If you would like a way to automate the collection and integration of data from your clients into Salesforce.com, FormAssembly is the App that can do it for you.  When you install the App, you get a FormAssembly tab right in your org, so you can manage all your forms and surverys from within Salesforce.com.  The form-building interface is clean and intuitive and supports all the options you would expect, including conditional fields, calculated fields, and validation rules.  Your completed forms and surveys can be easily integrated into your website, sent via mass-email, connected to a payment gateway, or sent to targeted contacts from Salesforce.com records.

The FormAssembly Salesforce.com Connector can match existing records or create new ones, based on what you need.  For instance, when a customer fills out a form on your website, FormAssembly can check whether that contact is in your system already and then either update the existing record or create a new one.  Answers from their form will be added to the correct places in Salesforce.com, and you will be notified.

Take FormAssembly for a test drive by installing it in your Salesforce.com sandbox; Contact Us if you need help evaluating this App for your business.

For more information about the FormAssembly+ Salesforce integration, CLICK HERE
For an interesting article about why FormAssembly might work better than Salesforce Web-to-Lead, CLICK HERE

Read Cloudy's reviews of other popular Apps:
Conga Composer
FlipTop Social Profiles

Cloudy Cumulus is part of Redpath Consulting Group, based in Minneapolis, MN (c) 2012

Cloudy's Favorite Apps: Conga Composer

Conga Composer from AppExtremes is one of the most popular apps on the Salesforce.com AppExchange, and with good reason.  Conga allows you to produce formatted reports, emails, mailings and presentation documents with the click of a button.  Many users find tasks that used to take many hours can be reduced to a single step!  Conga Composer also extends the merging capabilities of Salesforce.com by allowing you to easily pull data from multiple objects into one final document.

If you have any business processes that involve lengthy sessions of copying and pasting data from one place to another, or if you wish you had better mail merge options, give Conga a try.  They offer a free 30 day trial and excellent ongoing customer support.

We would love to talk to you about your business, and help you to evaluate whether Conga might help your business.  If you think you might be interested in talking to a Salesforce.com consultant but are not sure what to expect, click here for more information.


Read Cloudy's reviews of other popular Apps:
Form Assembly
FlipTop Social Profiles


Cloudy Cumulus is part of Redpath Consulting Group, based in Minneapolis, MN (c) 2012