As a small business owner myself, I am interested in finding solutions online for helping me to run my business. I recently went to the SalesForce.com AppExchange because I had heard that there were lots of online solutions there.

As as small business owner, however, I found the site a bit overwhelming. More than 300 different applications? Who has time to sort through all of this and make sense of it all? Most of the ones I tried seem very "lightweight", meaning not real business functionality.

Others are services from SaaS providers who seem to have "wrapped" their functionality in a SalesForce compliant user interface and are hoping for free leads to flow from AppExchange. But if you use their functionality from within AppExchange, do you really have access to all of the capabilities? Or do you have to access their service outside of AppExchange for full functionality?

I'd be interested in others perspective on AppExchange and where SalesForce is going with this.

I've had absolutely no experience of Salesforce but I regularly hear feedback that it is fairly feature bloated and too complex for many small businesses. I've seen two places where this seems to be being tackled: Firstly, Entellium tell a nice story on their home page - that people don't use CRM systems because they are so difficult to use. Again, I haven't used the product but I hope they live up to their own hype. Secondly, if you really want simple, effective and lightweight, sign up for a free trial of BT Workspace: http://signup.btworkspace.com Store some opportunities, customer details and start saving important notes on them in the journal section.

 

I agree wholeheartedly that AppExchange is a bit overwhelming to end user SMBs. While the concept of AppExchange is sound, the execution and presentation gets in the way of the sale and user adoption. Each app is individually branded by the provider in a way that results in "impression chaos".  BrainShark, DataScope, OpenAir, MindJet, eTrace, DreamTeam, etc. None of those brands say anything about what their app is or does. You are left with a forest of competing brands that makes finding what you need/want a challenge that offers no improvement over searching out on the general web. The extent of categories is also daunting, and I would suspect is fundamentally inhibiting. Confronting so many categories immediately begs the question "How do these applications work together, if at all?" With so much apparent "dis-integration" from a branding and presentation perspective, it is not suprising if browsers are put off by the general complexity of searching and reviewing available apps.

hmmm - "feature bloated and too complex" - sounds a bit like a typical Microsoft business app to me then ;-)  And BT Workspace looks suspiciously like white-labelled SMB:Live which, of course, is an admittedly valiant effort to make the 'feature bloated and too complex' SharePoint app more palatable to small businesses - looks good on the tour stuff though :-)

 

I have similar concerns about Salesforce.com’s AppExchange.  A little over a year ago I was working with Salesforce as a possible reseller for AppExchange.  At that time, I felt it was a little to adhoc for the business world.  Selling business applications is not like selling songs on iTunes. Before a business is willing to invest the time and money to install a new solution, they want to feel comfortable the solution will meet their needs.  

Salesforce needs to put implement a rigorous certification process before software companies are allowed to post their application.  The goal would be to implement a certification that gave businesses comfort the application is solid.  For example, Salesforce should validate that software operates as advertised, the software company is financially viable, identify appropriate industries/market segments, etc..  I believe Salesforce is implementing a certification process, but I don’t know to what extent.