Calendaranything for Salesforce Review

It seems like recent times mark the beginning of a little bit of a trend in my reviews of Salesforce apps, where the thing I review doesn’t impress me that much. Last time, it was because the wheel was being seriously reinvented, and that’s part of it this time, too. See, what I’m going to look at does work quite well for what it proclaims, but I don’t really see it as a necessity. We’re going to discuss Calendaranything, a calendric enhancement app for your CRM solution. With Calendaranything, you’re reported to be able to schedule automation, meetings, lead responses and a number of other things within Salesforce. Calendar enhancements are a popular design choice for newcomers to app development for things like Salesforce. This is because calendar functions are not overly complicated to get the hang of with most APIs and frameworks, but complex enough to get a balanced and theoretically marketable test for working with something new. So, when it comes to any extension, app or add on exchange network for any framework, you see a lot of these calendar widgets and enhancement tools coming out. But, does Calendaranything work? As I said, it does work, and there’s pretty much nothing else to say about it. It ties in with all the various components of Salesforce, and you can sync calendars to automate management of leads, planning of projects and campaigns, and all that stuff, with a fleshed out, customized calendar interface. Calendaranything actually is a nice app, but it’s completely redundant for most people because Salesforce, once more, already has a rich API and an exposed calendar system that can be made, with almost no effort, to do every single thing this one can do, though I guess this one spares the effort of tying that all together. But, that’s not enough to make this truly practical to be its own thing, I have to say. So, this is the second time in as many reviews that I’ve been unimpressed by what readers have asked for a review of. But, ironically, it’s also not poorly designed, nor incapable of working the way you’d need a tied together system like this to work. It’s just, it’s redundant as heck. If Salesforce’s existing calendar functionality were nonexistent or subpar, this would come highly recommended from me, because it is elegantly and sharply put together. But, alas, it’s already there. Plus, to be honest, people don’t use these calendar tools as heavily as developers seem to think, most finding a simple Google calendar with a few notes and a brief bit of manual coordination to be more than sufficient for their needs in this department. Between the lack of necessity for calendar functionality of this sophistication, and the fact that Salesforce can already perform all the tasks in question, Calendaranything, while very well designed, isn’t going to be lauded by me, because it’s an exercise in pure redundancy. I hate writing less than positive reviews, and this is only the second in my long history of them, that I’ve had to give a requested topic like this a downer note. Here’s hoping the next one will be something not redundant and also well built!  
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Amanda is the Lead Author & Editor of Rainforce Blog. Amanda established the Rainforce blog to create a source for news and discussion about some of the issues, challenges, news, and ideas relating to Salesforce usage.