Come on, get ‘Appy!

The treasure chest that is the AppExchange. I’ve been holding this post on the back-burner for awhile, mostly because I was having trouble writing it. But something incredible happened this week that spurred me into finishing it. The AppExchange hit the million-mile mark – 1,000,000 installed AppExchange apps!

But what do apps mean for the Dabbing Developer? A lot actually. I’m about to let you in on one of the biggest secrets to learning code – borrowing it from others!  When you just have the basics, it’s too daunting to try & code something completely from scratch. But taking a chunk of code that you know works, and tweaking it to solve your business problem is completely within your reach.

You might be asking, “OK, but still, what does this have to do with the AppExchange?” (Drumroll please…) Force.com Labs! These are the apps added to the AppExchange by Salesforce employees. They are free & plug in seamlessly to your org. And the best part is there is tons of great code in there that you can (for the most part) view and use. While some of their more popular offerings are their pre-built dashboards (which are also cool and very popular), there are some very slick apps out there that will provide some great code for you to read through.

As a place to get started, here are some of the apps that I’ve tried messing around with: Account News, Inline Account Hierarchy, and Milestones.

And if you want some of my overall app picks, check out my post on the Salesforce blog or my Dreamforce session on marketing apps.