20 years ago, in 1999, Salesforce was born in a garage in San Francisco. In 2006, Salesforce launched AppExchange, the first cloud marketplace where Salesforce customers could find everything they need to extend Salesforce. Salesforce's transformation and growth over the past 20 years is astronomical, and AppExchange has been a big part of that. Today, we have over 5,000 solutions, but the anniversary inspired a look back to where we began. We sought to find the apps that were among the first on AppExchange, and share them for a nostalgic (yet super helpful) install. In alphabetical order, here's a look at some of the first 20 apps on AppExchange.
Altify Opportunity Manager
Listing date: January 2006
Coach sales teams in real-time to qualify effectively, research the relationship landscape, collaborate with customers, develop solutions that address business challenges, and establish competitive approaches that deliver a win-win outcome.
"We have been using Altify for some time and the overall experience of using this tool has been great. It helps sales teams in identifying things we don’t know about customers, and thus helps in defining a winning strategy. I would highly recommend Altify to any sales team." - Tushar Shah
Apttus CPQ
Listing date: September 2006
This multi-channel sales tool is designed to help companies configure, price, and quote deals accurately, quickly, and easily. Apttus CPQ handles simple to highly complex product and pricing configurations across all sales channels.
"Great product with impressive feature set. Apttus team is very good and helped a lot during the implementation process." - Tibor Sardy
Budgeting and Purchasing
Listing date: January 2006
Tie your purchase orders directly to related invoices and budgets with this Salesforce Labs app so it can accurately monitor how money is spent and track the complete purchasing lifecycle.
"This is exactly what I needed to get a jump start on building a budget app for my org. I was able to customize the objects in this app to fit my company's needs. Saved me a lot of time and works for our small business." - Tracie Loretz
Bug Tracking and Quality Assurance
Listing date: January 2006
This Salesforce Labs app allows you to see which products have recurring problems, which get the most feature requests, and get visibility into bugs reported on products, the fixes made, and who is debugging.
"...With Bug Tracking and Quality Assurance, anyone in the company can log a bug report or make a feature request and our product manager can group them by theme and track them though the development process..." - David Ciccarelli
Clicktools
Listing date: January 2006
Collect, centralize, and act on feedback using surveys, call scripts, and web forms integrated with Salesforce.
"We use ClickTools to send surveys to customers and to internal departments to better improve processes. As a Salesforce admin, I also utilize Clicktools to allow users to submit forms (ClickTools Surveys) to admins for different types of requests. Once you start getting the hang of setting up your surveys, the possibilities are endless. There are a few vendors that I absolutely love doing business with and this is one of them. Their customer service is outstanding." - Joshua Elsman
D&B Hoovers
Listing date: January 2006
Leverage data and analytics to provide a faster path from prospect to profitable relationship. Use D&B Hoovers directly within Salesforce to engage faster with customers and close more business.
"We spent a month reviewing all the prospecting tools that sync with Salesforce. This was by far the best. The 'My Preferred Contacts' feature is a great time saver when you're looking at a company with many contacts. It was easy to install and train our users. If you are an advanced admin you can create some cool automated workflows in Salesforce for this tool. The data depth and accuracy is great." - Diana Lustenader
DemandTools
Listing date: January 2006
Use this enterprise capable suite of data quality modules to control, standardize, verify, deduplicate, import, and generally manipulate Salesforce and/or Force.com data, and boost administrator productivity.
"I have loved this tool for almost 10 years now and it has become an indispensable part of my life as a nonprofit administrator." - Christine Richman
EDVantage lite
Listing date: March 2006
Empower schools to manage and track essential aspects of the educational process concerning faculty, staff, students, and alumni. EDVantage lite does not have entire functionality of EDVantage.
InsideView Sales
Listing date: August 2006
Target the right buyers with the right message at exactly the right time with InsideViews' data, insights, and connections. Research your prospects, receive news alerts, and leverage your connections all from within Salesforce.
"It provides very useful information that helps me get up to speed on my accounts before engaging. I really like having all of the info in one place and being able to quickly navigate to what I need via the UI." - Andrew Lyons
Jitterbit Harmony
Listing date: June 2006
Integrate Salesforce with any SaaS, on-prem, or cloud app, and easily compose innovative solutions.
"Across dozens of independent projects over the years, Jitterbit has never failed us - from straight data pushing, to scheduled integrations and real-time data syncs, to crazy scripted and formulated transformations, message queues, email notifications and reporting statistics, the works - whether the job that we need to do is simple child's play, to mind-bogglingly and oppressively complex, I know Jitterbit can handle it, no problem." - Nicholas Strong
LinkPoint Connect
Listing date: April 2006
Streamline data access with an instant view of Salesforce data in IBM Notes. Record emails, create contacts, and sync content to Salesforce from IBM Notes. Citrix, Terminal Services and Partner Communities supported.
"We have been using LinkPoint360 to enable synchronizing Lotus Notes eMail for our key business developers. Being able to have emails sent and received through Lotus Notes automatically appear on the Contact, Lead, or Opportunity in Salesforce is an incredible time saver for our users..." - MSmith
Metazoa Snapshot for Change And Release Management
Listing date: May 2006
Get visual tools to deploy metadata assets from a sandbox or Salesforce DX project to a production account.
"Snapshot allows us to back up our org, easily move data between the orgs, and keep an audit trail for auditing purposes. The comparison reporting between orgs is a great time saver. Technical support has been outstanding" - Michael Hedrick
NPOrganizer lite
Listing date: March 2006
Consolidate information such as donations, grants, and other integral aspects of your organization into one, simple to use location.
"The NPOrganizer has been a real boost for our nonprofit organization. We can now manage volunteers, donations, marketing, events, and grants from one simple, efficient location. More importantly we can run reports allowing us to convert our mission statement into results. This has proved to be indispensable for measuring our organization’s success and relationships, which allows us to execute our mission more effectively. " - Laura Peterson
Procurement
Listing date: January 2006
Use this Salesforce Labs app to standardize purchase requests, streamline purchasing processes, and gather data to support requests for preferred pricing from vendors.
"This is a good, free starter app for procurement. Easy to demonstrate how you can bring them on the tool with your other teams. You'll want to customize it pretty shortly after installing it, but a great starting point." - David McDermott
Recruiting Manager
Listing date: January 2006
This Salesforce Labs app provides a structured, consolidated way to track and manage the recruiting process, so organizations have easy access to information about openings, applicants, candidates, and hiring goals.
"We considered several applicant tracking systems that were low to very pricey. This Recruiting Manager was recommended to us for our needs and turns out it is an excellent resource for us." - Susan Dial
Sage Intacct Cloud Financial Management
Listing date: January 2006
A cloud financial management solution that works seamlessly with Salesforce for quote-to-cash automation and the right visibility between sales and finance.
"...I have found Intacct to be a great collection of features and functionality. The ability to scale the platform for use with a single entity to multiple entity environments is great and is not excessively costly like some of the competitors. Key controls with respect to user access and segregation of duties facilitates management of the platform." - Drew Davis
SalesFolder
Listing date: April 2006
Automate sharing and distribution of all your CRM documents. Its Dropbox-like functionality creates a complete Salesforce document repository on your desktop, allowing for easy file editing and sharing without a need to open Salesforce.
"Now I can upload documents and attachments with one simple mouse move. And that's great to have the ability to save documents directly to SalesFolder where they synchronize automatically with Salesforce. Cool. :)" - anonymous
SMP for Salesforce
Listing date: March 2007
Found on the AppExchange Japan marketplace, this is a marketing automation tool, including automation and efficiency of marketing operations, integrated data management, marketing analytics environment, and more.
Get the app (Japanese AppExchange) >>
Qvidian
Listing date: April 2006
This RFP and proposal automation solution creates new documents from Salesforce and links existing documents to accounts and opportunities.
"Qvidian is easy to use. It is very intuitive. The new library is much better than the classic library." - Erika Salazar-Molina
Xactly Incent
Listing date: May 2006
This Sales Performance Management (SPM) solution allows companies to track and transform their incentive plans. Compensation spans all types of incentives – commissions, bonuses, contests, and non-cash rewards – and encompasses all types of payees.
"We are in our second plan year using the Xactly tool. The ability to completely customize compensation plans in this system is a tremendous value. The user interface is clean and semi-intuitive..." - Renae Jefferies
See all of the apps here. Happy 20th birthday, Salesforce. We look forward to another 20 years of growth and #appyness.
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