Salesforce Apps

Apps and Components to add from AppExchange

Overview

Apps menu
- Apps you build
Tabs
Partner-built apps
AppExchange Use Case Categories
Interesting
Code scans
AppExchange 3rd-Party Tools
Our Ideas
Learning
Social
Partners
More about Salesforce

This is a step-by-step hands-on tutorial to Apps and AppExchange, with technical commentary along the way.

The Apps menu

The Classic user interface has a blue “hot dog” menu at the upper-right corner.

Whatever you select will be removed from the list, but appear in the blue hot dog, and remain there the next time until another is selected.

The “Sales” app is the base CRM (Customer Relationship Management) app, the main offering from Salesforce as a company.

PROTIP: CRM is the Salesforce company’s stock market symbol.

Apps in the list are NOT alphabetically listed. Custom app are added to the list as well:

Seq.	Menu
1.	Sales
2.	Service
3.	Marketing
4.	Community
5.	Site.com
6.	Salesforce Chatter
7.	Content
9.	Charitable
10.	Garage
11.	Conference
12.	Suggestion Box
13.	Trail Tracker
14.	App Launcher
15.	Relaxation Gauntlet
-	-
16.	AppExchange
17.	Developer Community
18.	Success Community

PROTIP: There are limits to how many apps can be installed, depending on the level of license you have.

Select the “App Launcher” for a tiled page. You can move each app to the position you want in Setup > Managed Apps > App Menu.

Alternately, with the Lightning Experience, hover your mouse over the App Launcher icon (with the 9 dots) at the upper-left of any Salesforce console screen, and “App Launcher” appears:

Next to it is the current app (“Sales Console” in this example).
Click the app launcher icon for a pop-up listing apps and items.

(Click the picture above here for a larger image in a new window.)

Thia list of apps varies depending on licensing and permissions.
PROTIP: The three lines under each icon means you can drag and place it where you want. For example, drag “Sales” to the upper-left corner.
Click “Visit App Exchange”.

“AppExchange apps” are developed by 3rd parties, usually an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) Salesforce partners. An app is either free or for a fee.

“Managed apps” are managed by Salesforce.
Click “AppExchange” at the lower-left of the pop-up for https://appexchange.salesforce.com/

PROTIP: The mascot “Appy” is an owl. She is associated with AppExchange.
Close the tab or or flip back to the “Home” page tab on your browser.
Press Esc (escape) on your keyboard to exit the App Launcher dialog.

Apps you build

Various tutorials:

The Sample Recruiting App is within the Lightning Platform Fundamentals section of Developer Documentation

Tabs

Each app defines its own set of tabs.

Partner-built apps

AppExchange partners build ISVforce apps and Lightning Platform OEM Embedded apps.

Skuid is a low-code cloud platform that was an early adopter of SLDS and “is the only scalable, enterprise class, fully integrated and native user experience platform running on Lightning.”

ISVforce apps

ISVforce apps augment Sales Cloud or Service Cloud business functions. ISVforce apps are installed by customers into existing orgs, so they use Salesforce features that the customer has available, which can include Salesforce Communities and additional objects added. This is like adding Saleforce Einstein capabilties.

Vlocity adds to Salesforce UX user interface components: cards, guided interactions (called OmniScripts™), and ETL. These are applied to industry-specific offerings. The company offers clickstream tracking integrated with Salesforce Wave Analytics to provide timing, integrations, and outcomes of sales and services interactions. The “Vlocity Intelligence” uses “learning algorithms” to determines the most appropriate resources to present to visitors based on a “ranking” of attribute profile data from Contacts, Accounts, Interactions, or any standard or custom object. It also provides an API to that data. It became a Forbes Cloud 100 company on all that. BTW Vlocity isn’t just any AppExchange Premier Partner, it’s Salesforce corp’s largest non-M&A investment, with >$50M invested. Vlocity “lives together” with Salesforce in its San Francisco HQ.

OEM Embedded apps

OEM Embedded apps can be sold to those who don’t use Salesforce already as well as existing Salesforce customers. Such customers would receive a Salesforce app embedded with the app under three types of user licenses:

Lightning Platform for administrators
Customer Community for users of the app, seeing only their own data and using a limited part of the app.
Customer Community Plus for those who can be included in role hierarchy permissions.

Those who purchase over 100 licenses get a 10% discount. Those who purchase over 500 licenses get a 15% discount.

Lightning Components

When a customization is too complex or specialized to implement in the declarative interface alone, Salesforce provides programmatic tools for app development:

Apex, Salesforce’s cloud-based programming language, is syntactically similar to Java or C#. But Apex makes it easy to work with domain objects (such as Leads, Opportunities, Accounts, Contacts, etc.).
Visualforce, a tag-based markup language similar to HTML, is used to build UI pages and components. Like Apex, it works with objects and user actions. It also works with third-party libraries like jQuery and AngularJS.
Lightning Components, a JavaScript framework for building reusable components that can render UI, handle client-side events, and communicate with the Salesforce server. These can be sold on the AppExchange!

AppExchange Use Case Categories

AppExchange has these categories of add-ons:

Address Verification
Advertising
Analytics
Chat
Comparison Shopping Engines
Content Delivery Network
Content Management
Continuity & Replenishment
Customer Relationship Management
Email Marketing
Fraud
Fulfillment
Gift Cards
Loyalty
Marketing
Marketplace
Mobile
Order Management
Payment
Personalization
POS (Point of Sale devices)
Product Information Management
Ratings & Reviews
Rich Media
Search
Security
Shopping Cart Abandonment
Site Monitoring
Social
Store Locator
Tag Management
Tax
Testing & Segmentation
Translation

Interesting

Manage Your Agile Development from Salesforce Oct 26, 2016 Ray Pendyck (@raypendyck) demos Salesforce’s Agile Acelerator on AppExchange for licensed users.
Agile Accelerator Community
Getting Started PDF from Summer ‘16.

https://github.com/SalesforceFoundation/ApexDoc The latest java source for ApexDoc, a tool to document your Salesforce Apex classes.

https://github.com/salesforce/grammaticus Grammaticus is a grammar engine that allows users to rename nouns while keeping content grammatically correct. Grammaticus encodes the article, noun, and adjective declensions for over 30 languages, and supports programmatic use of nouns

Code scans

Fill out this web page to manually request an automated scan of all unpackaged code in your Salesforce organization:

https://security.secure.force.com/security/tools/forcecom/scanner

Documentation about the Checkmarx Static Analysis Suite (CxSAST) at https://security.secure.force.com/security/tools/forcecom/scannerhelp describes the security and quality issues the scanner identifies.

The security vulnerabilities the scanner aims to detect include coverage of security standards OWASP Top 10, SANS 25, etc.:

Cross Site Scripting (reflected, stored, and DOM based)
SOQL/SOSL Injection
Access Control Issues (Sharing, FLS)
Cross site request forgery attacks
Arbitrary Redirects
Overly permissive postMessage targets

The Force.com Security Source Scanner also detects common Apex coding and design issues:

DML statements inside loops
SOQL/SOSL inside loops
Hardcoding Trigger.new[0]
Hardcoding Trigger.old[0]
Queries with no Where clause or no LIMIT clause
Not bulkifying apex methods
Async (@future) methods inside loops
Hardcoding IDs
Multiple triggers on same object
Static Resource referencing
Multiple Visualforce forms in the same page
Test methods without assert

This service can be quite slow depending on how many scans are in the queue.

The same scan can be performed locally using an Eclipse plugin from the vendor at

https://checkmarx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/KC/pages/74317880/Setting+Up+the+CxSAST+Eclipse+Plugin

Salesforce can provide a license to integrate it into your Continuous Integration (CI) build system.

https://security.secure.force.com/sourcescanner/ Org ID not attached to your Appexchange Publishing Console

AppExchange 3rd-Party Tools

https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxHome

Salesforce Labs Solutions at https://appexchange.salesforce.com/collection/SalesforceLabs are free and customizable Labs Apps built by Salesforce employees.

Examples from 3rd-parties (partners):

Security Zen at http://SecurityZen.net @SecurityZen_Net ‏is a new tool for managing #Salesforce Security.
Ultra Field History Tracker @UFHTAuditTool ‏since June 2018 is an advanced SFDC field history tracking app supporting both standard and custom objects, unlimited fields, forever retention WITHOUT consuming data storage.
WSProxy for Salesforce Marketing Cloud July 17, 2018 by Eliot Harper offers scripting support through AMPscript and Server-Side JavaScript (or SSJS) scripting languages.
Salesforce data loading tools, web services, middleware (such as Dell Boomi, Informatica, etc.)
APTTUS Contract Management Software (CLM)

Our Ideas

Here are some innovations:

When an IoT button is pressed, send a ping into Salesforce Chatter and update the database with a timestamp.
Adapt the $90 Google Vision Kit with a stand-alone camera to capture images such as bar codes or QR codes, converts to text, then inserts that info into Salesforce. Also, photos categorization on Machine Learning object recognition services within Amazon, Azure, Google, IBM, etc. This by a Android/iOS smartphone or a custom device such as the $249 Amazon DeepLens.
In a component window, watch a webcam of your house or behind your back. Use Einstein to alert if something changes.
Two-way sync of data in a shopping website running WordPress/WooCommerce.
A URL Shortener utility
Access several weather APIs associated with a contact, such as https://darksky.net/forecast/45.4852,-108.9704/us12/en
https://codeburst.io/6-interesting-apis-to-check-out-in-2018-5d6830063f29
Send WhatsApp via Twillio.
Wikipedia of the town
Glassdoor.com ratings
Cats
Messaging as in Google Gmail

Learning

Mike Wheeler’s video course about AppExchange in 2016 (on Udemy)

Trail: ISV Developer Beginner [9 hrs 30 mins]

Salesforce CRM Customization and Extension [1 hr] +500
AppExchange App Strategy to Identify the tools and technologies needed to build your AppExchange app.
App Licensing and Customer Support for AppExchange [1 hr 45 mins] +400
App Upgrading for AppExchange [45 mins] +300
AppExchange App Trial Management [1 hr 20 mins] +500
App Development Without Limits +1500 to avoid limits as you develop scalable apps.

https://www.facebook.com/APPEXCHANGE/

See https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.214.0.packagingGuide.meta/packagingGuide/oem_user_license_comparison.htm

https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.214.0.packagingGuide.meta/packagingGuide/oem_user_license_comparison.htm review the full list of considerations

https://partners.salesforce.com/AppExchangeTrailblazerChecklist

Partners

https://partners.salesforce.com/s/education/consultants/Consulting_Program

Salesforce Consulting Group = http://www.sfcg.ca/

Partners use the Environment Hub to create orgs for development and testing purposes.

http://p.force.com/isvtech has past recordings of Technical Enablement for AppExchange Partners on the third Thursday of every month.

appinnovators@salesforce.com

https://twitter.com/partnerforce

https://www.facebook.com/salesforcedevs

https://partners.salesforce.com/_ui/core/chatter/groups/GroupProfilePage?g=0F9300000001s8E Partner Roadmap Group

https://www.appexchangeguides.com/i/929930-a-complete-guide-to-the-salesforce-isv-technical-enablement-team/1?

More about Salesforce

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Wilson Mar