Find Your Way Around AppExchange

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Search for and filter solutions.
  
• List the factors that influence personalized recommendations.
  

Follow Along with Trail Together

Want to follow along with an expert as you work through this step? Take a look at this video, part of the Trail Together series.

(This clip starts at the 11:06 minute mark, in case you want to rewind and watch the beginning of the step again.)

Introduction

AppExchange is a flourishing marketplace, with tens of thousands of listings and new ones added regularly. It’s good to have ample choice, but not to get bogged down in it. 

Maria Jimenez is a Salesforce admin for Ursa Major Solar, Inc., a solar components and systems supplier. Maria knows her way around AppExchange. Her advice: When you’re looking for the best solution, a little planning goes a long way.

Log In

First, Maria logs in to AppExchange. That’s a smart move. Logged-in users are rewarded with personalized recommendations based on job role, industry, and more.

Personalization works best when your profile is up-to-date. To manage your profile, visit your Trailblazer.me page.

Search for a Solution

The Ursa Major team wants to streamline order fulfillment. They’re happy with their fulfillment vendor, but dream of a day when they can ship orders and track packages from within Salesforce. This is a common business challenge, and Maria is confident that she can find a solution on AppExchange. 

AppExchange customers who have a well-defined idea of what they need start with search.

Maria opens a web browser, logs in to AppExchange, and positions her cursor in the search field. AppExchange lends a helping hand by displaying a list of her recently visited pages. To see details, she can select an item from the list.

None of Maria's recent items fit her needs because she’s looking for something new. She submits search terms and is rewarded with a list of relevant results. 

The search results page groups solutions by type, with types listed in alphabetical order: Apps, Bolt solutions, and so on.

Filter Search Results

With a simple search, Maria went from thousands of possible options to hundreds. That’s a lot of results—to be honest, a few too many. Finding the right solution is still like finding a needle in a haystack. She needs to get rid of the haystack by applying search filters. Filters tell the search engine, “Show me this, but don’t show me that.”

You can filter results by:

• Pricing
  
• Rating
  
• Business need
  
• Solution type
  
• Product
  
• Supported Features
  
• Salesforce Editions
  
• Industry
  
• Language
  
• Impact
  

By default, no filters are applied. That explains why Maria’s search returned so many results. She selects the filters that she needs: Salesforce App, Enterprise Edition, and English. The search results page updates to display a shorter, easier-to-digest list of results—English language apps for Enterprise Edition. 

Maria quickly finds some apps that are a good fit and is off to share the details with her team.

Explore the AppExchange Home Page

During some down time between meetings, Maria returns to AppExchange. She scrolls through the home page to find recommendations tailored for admins and the products that Ursa Major uses. 

Let’s take a deeper look.

Pick Up Where You Left Off

It can take more than one AppExchange visit to find what you need. As long as you’re logged in like Maria is, when you’re in the middle of an ongoing search for a solution or consultant, check out Pick Up Where You Left Off.

Maria sees a summary of her most recently viewed listings: this section acts like sticky notes reminding her of what she’s looking for and the business problems she’s trying to solve.

Popular for Your Role, Industry, or Salesforce Products…

As an Admin, Maria is interested in data and tools that make her life easier. So she’s thrilled to see a section with app recommendations specific to her role. 

Maria makes a note to tell her colleagues about this: her Ursa Major developers, sales reps, and business managers see content specific to their roles. If they combine all of those recommendations into their Salesforce implementation … how efficient and amazing that will be.

As Maria continues to scroll, she sees additional types of personalized recommendations, including suggestions specific to Ursa Major’s industry and products.

Trending Today

Trends reflect what’s popular in the moment. Wearable tech and chatbots are current technology trends. On AppExchange, the trending solutions are the ones with the most customer installs. 

Maria reviews this section and finds a personalized list of most-installed solutions. 

Extend Salesforce Products

If we could time travel back to the San Francisco apartment where Salesforce started, we’d see a group intent on building a CRM platform to transform how companies run their businesses. That platform is the foundation that our other products, such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud Engagement, and CRM Analytics, run on.

AppExchange solutions not only extend the platform, but also extend Salesforce products. When you need a solution to pair with a specific product that you use, go to Explore, and then select Products.

Meet Industry Needs

Every industry has unique needs. The capabilities of a healthcare clinic are different from those of media outlets. To find solutions designed for your industry by industry experts, go to Explore, and then select Industries.

Solutions are available for many industries, including:

• Communications
  
• Education
  
• Financial services
  
• Government
  
• Healthcare and life sciences
  
• Manufacturing
  
• Media
  
• Nonprofits
  
• Professional services
  
• Real estate
  
• Retail
  
• Travel, transportation, and hospitality
  

Find Solutions for Every Salesforce Installation

Salesforce installations can be complex, utilizing the best of multiple clouds and features. Ursa Major’s installation is a prime example: it includes Commerce Cloud, B2C Commerce, Tableau, Sales Cloud, and Data Cloud. So Maria knows that to complete all of the tasks on her and her colleagues’ lists, she must consider a combination of AppExchange solutions by type, product, and industry.

Remember how Maria and her team want to streamline order fulfillment? To do that, she’s looking for B2C Commerce solutions that provide Ursa Major with a cleaner front end and that coordinate with her backend systems. She also needs data solutions that improve the quality and speed of data delivery, and provide executive data visualizations to report on fulfillments at all levels of the business.

In her search on AppExchange, Maria considers:

B2C Commerce solutions. B2C Commerce cartridges and headless integrations extend Ursa Major’s Salesforce environment. Maria views the AppExchange Commerce Cloud product collection to check out these easy-to-install solutions.

Data Cloud solutions. Maria discovers data enrichment, data activation, and data strategy apps in the AppExchange Data Cloud product collection. These solutions will improve Ursa Major’s data quality and accuracy.

Tableau Accelerators. Tableau Accelerators, prebuilt dashboards and reports that extend Tableau’s functionality, will enhance Ursa Major’s Tableau usage. Maria browses the Tableau Accelerators product collection on AppExchange.

Next, we explore how to apply different solution types to business challenges. 

Resources

• AppExchange Blog Post: Introducing AppExchange Explore: A Simplified, Data-driven Way to Find Apps
• Salesforce Blog Post: Introducing a Smarter AppExchange: A More Intelligent Salesforce Store