OREANDA-NEWS. June 02, 2016. In the brand new ebook, 23 Apps Recommended by App Pros, we collected customer stories from multiple Salesforce World Tour stops and learned about AppExchange superusers’ experiences using apps to help their businesses.

Many of the apps mentioned in this collection of app tales are lightning ready. Lightning is a new user experience that lets you quickly build and customize apps with a rich set of drag-and-drop components. Lightning ready apps are designed to deliver the most consistent user experience as you move your organization to lightning. (Look for the “Lightning Ready” symbol on AppExchange.)

Here’s a look at those lightning ready apps, and what these superusers had to say about them. Sit back, grab a coffee and your sandbox, and let’s get ready to talk apps.

1. Skuid for Salesforce

“The time to market for rebuilding widgets, tools, and wizards typically takes developers hours, days, or weeks,” shared Melissa Butler, Salesforce Architect, RealPage, at Salesforce World Tour Dallas, “It required custom Visualforce and apex code. With Skuid, all you need is an understanding of data models, and any admin can quickly create these tools, wizards, and more. It puts the power to build in the hands of the admin.”

2. Conga Composer by Conga

“Conga Composer provides additional and flexible capabilities in Salesforce for admins,” remarked Josh Monson, President, One Point One Group, at Salesforce World Tour Dallas, “For instance, if you’re looking to pull engagement for the year on a particular account, without Conga Composer, it is a very manual process. Think about all of the scrolling you would be doing on one record. Also, what does engagement mean? Is it opportunities, orders, and invoices? What about other apps that tie into that account? Conga Composer answers all of these questions. Conga Composer tracks meeting information, such as number of meetings, and meeting attendees. It tracks speaking engagements, conference attendance, and more. All of this ties into account engagement. Conga Composer not only pulls all of this information, but it bubbles it up to one page in an easy-to-read account summary. On top of all of that, the support is unbelievable. I’ve never seen such amazing support. Ever.”

3. SteelBrick CPQ by Salesforce

“There are areas in Salesforce where you may find you need more robust capabilities, and CPQ can be one of those areas,” noted Josh Monson, “SteelBrick fills that CPQ need. You don’t need a developer — it’s all drag and drop. It’s fast and easy to build and use. There are templates, product picks, and everything you need to get the deal done. Ensuring success in sales is like installing bumpers in a bowling alley; it’s a lot easier to get a strike when you’re set up for success, and SteelBrick does just that.”

4. Geopointe by Arrowpointe

“Geopointe takes the geographical information that you have in Salesforce and presents it on a map,” shared Lincoln Rowley, Director Salesforce Strategy and Operations, Wyndham Hotels, at Salesforce World Tour New York, “Oftentimes it’s a challenge to quickly determine your best territories, but with this app, instead of spending a day or week figuring that out, you can spend 15 minutes and have all of the information you need. It’s not just software, it’s an opportunity to do things you only once imagined.”

5. Drawloop Document Generation by Nintex

“We are using Drawloop for mass emailing of all DocuSign documents. This is a great example of how all of the apps on the AppExchange are friendly with each other,” stated Marcel Hobizal, Director of Training & Support Services, Equivalent DATA at Salesforce World Tour Houston, “The classic use case is salespeople need to generate a contract; instead of doing it in Word, they hit a button and generate a contract in Drawloop, which pulls data from Salesforce and other places, creates it, and sends it out through DocuSign. Then, the customer signs it, and the deal is done. Onto the next one. This happens to be one integration that’s pretty amazing. We’re more than a little excited about its functionality.”

6. TaskRay by Bracket Labs

“TaskRay is a project management app, and we find that the best use case is for software companies deploying products. TaskRay helps you templatize that entire process. It’s user-friendly, and you can do it as a config admin,” stated Geraldine Gray, CEO, Endiem, at Salesforce World Tour Houston, “TaskRay automatically creates the project, pushes the project out to the whole team, and schedules from there. You can assign people to it, schedule emails that go out to customers, and more. You can tie it to other apps, such as Drawloop, so when a deal closes, you can send documents to customers. It is a massive time-saver. We’re a huge fan of TaskRay, and a lot of our clients use it.”

7. ChangeIt! By CloudLogistix

“ChangeIt! creates transparency and gives ownership to stakeholders when you’re making changes to your Salesforce org,” noted Carrie Philipp, Senior Business Analyst, Qumu Corporation, at Salesforce World Tour Minneapolis, “Before the app, our employees didn’t know when changes were taking place in our Salesforce org. Now, Qumu sends a report to all of the stakeholders for the project, and that report is used as a way to conduct the meeting and create accountability, as well as track what people are doing against the changes. ChangeIt! also allows us to connect our changes to an object, creating a history log by object.”

Lightning helps to maximize user productivity, featuring comprehensive analytics and in-line intelligence that will drive transformation across your organization. Learn more about these lightning ready apps, and get your hands on all of the apps mentioned in our brand new ebook right here.