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There’s been a lot of great activity lately in the last week or so so let’s jump right in.
The first app I want to call out is Social Salesforce using LinkedIn’s Company Insider. Social Salesforce installs a simple Visualforce page which you can add to your Account page layout. Once added it shows you how many people are at that company as well as a few of your personal connections. Clicking on a link takes you to that company or that person’s page on LinkedIn. This app comes to us by way of Mark Sivill, creator of quite a few nice apps including Salesforce International Mapping using Google Maps and Chatter Weather.
Next up, LinkForce. LinkForce is what’s powering the “labs.force.com” domain shortener so you’ve probably already used it. Once installed, you add it to your Force.com Site, make a few small configuration tweaks – all outlined in a tab in the app – and you’re done. You have your very own URL shortening system complete with analytics. LinkForce comes to us from Jonathan Hersh who also wrote the very popular Chatter Combo Pack.
This next app has been out for a couple of weeks and in fact it is an update to a classic. Find Nearby lets you see Accounts, Contacts and Leads plotted on a map. You can add visits to your route, get driving directions, see google street view and more. Find Nearby is brought to you by Iman Maghroori and it's a great use of Visualforce and the JavaScript Google Maps APIs. Right now this is a managed package – unmanaged is coming but if you need the source code sooner than that just let me know.
Another new app that’s out last week is Birthday Emailer. This app provides an Apex class that sends birthday greetings to your contacts. It includes an easily customizable template as well as instructions. You can definitely use this for Birthdays but you could also use it for other things – periodic reminders? Annual thank yous for your customers’ business on the anniversary of their first order – anything like that is a great use case. This app is brought to us by Erik Yewell who also created the popular Projects and Issues app.
I’ve got one more app I want to call out – Dupe Eliminator. This app has been around for a while but it’s just has a quick face lift and it’s better than ever. Dupe Eliminator helps you identify and merge duplicate records. The version 1.5 configuration guide has great info on how it works and how you can enhance it. At a high level, you can select up to three records to merge at a time, all the data goes in to the master record, and it brings over related list items as well. Dupe Eliminator was created by Keng Tan and is very useful.
That’s the Force.com Labs update for today. Have questions about an app? Click on the Ask button next to any Force.com Labs listing on the AppExchange. Please follow @ForceDotComLabs on Twitter and don't forget to review your favorite app today.