My Favorite Salesforce Tools
Last year I came across a post by Sharif Shaalan on his blog Salesforce.com Tips, Tricks, Solutions, and Thoughts talking about his favorite Salesforce Tools he uses quite often and I really enjoyed his posting, so I thought I would share my favorite tools. Salesforce.com prides it’s self as a “No Software” company meaning everything you need to get up and running is in the product and platform. Well you may not need software to get up and running on Salesforce but it takes great tools to keep to running smooth and efficient. This week I wanted to share with you my favorite tools that make my daily Salesforce administration and development easy.
When i first dicovered Force.com Explorer my eyes lit up with joy. As a SQL user for years this was something I understood quite well. Force.com Explorer is the SOQL viewer similar to Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio but slimmed down. I use it quite often to track down variables in rows or to run a quick query to export some data for a requestor. It has the ability to execute update statements from it but i don’t use that functionality. (Adobe Air)
If you’ve ever needed to upload data to salesforce you’ve used this tool or at least seen it. It’s a must have when your learning how to push data to salesforce. Data Loader is a work horse desktop apps for uploading massive amounts of data to an object at once using CSV file or a ODBC connection. Since it was created by Salesforce it’s the tool Salesforce talks about in Salesforce documentation (Cross Platform)
Yeah no not the website but the extension for chrome. I know it’s a weird name and not very descriptive but this is a Google chrome extension that puts a shortcut on your google chrome apps page. It give you the ability to have one click to the salesforce login page at a touch of a button. This is probably one my most used chrome extensions. (Chrome Based)
Great tool only designed for updating and deleting records. Massupdate is a very gritty application and very lite on resource usage. Massupdate allows for you modify hundreds of thousands of records at once using just SOQL syntax For example changing records country from US or USA to United States in a country column. (Cross Platform)
Replaces the main functionality for chatter desktop for me. Chatter Monitor is an extension for chrome that allows me to monitors my chatter feed of items i follow on chatter as well as post to chatter. Where this tool excels beyond chatter desktop is it allows for you to do this across multiple orgs. The only thing you can’t do through the extension is send out polls or post files to chatter. Chatter Monitor is one of my most used tools (Chrome Based).
I love automation software so the next two are cloud based services that allow automating of cloud to cloud.
Ifttt is a very simple to set up API integration tool. IFTTT stands for If This Then That. Basically an action occurs on one of the supported services and you trigger a result to occur somewhere else. Say you want to feed data from twitter to facebook this where IFTTT comes in handy or feed data from instagram to chatter. Which I find very useful but weird since Chatter is free but more of a private social network. I’m always a fan of automated tools that make doing things simpler. Especially when there free!!!! (Web based)
//ifttt.com/assets/embed_recipe.jsZapier is another API integration based tool and is one of the best in the world. Zapier is free but they also offer a paid version takes the functionality to the next level. The difference between Zapier and IFTTT is that Zapier focuses on integrating private clouds, say for example you want to feed leads from Salesforce to Zoho CRM then this is tool or you want to feed salesforce to SQL Azure. (Web based)
