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.