Always good to hear from All-Stars. Dirk Nowitzki of the NBA championship-winning Dallas Mavericks is currently in Germany and unavailable, so let’s hear from an AppExchange All-Star: Luke Cushanick, a certified developer and advanced admin who directs a team of admins and developers building orgs for 2tor 2tor (sound it out).

He’s also the leader of the NYC Developer Users Group and is expanding the Salesforce community in NYC through user groups, virtual communities and presentations to technical training institutes. And he’s got a heck of a jump shot.

“Give me options, lots of them, competing with each other, complementing each other and each one better than the last,” Cushanick says. “The AppExchange provides that for Salesforce.com (News - Alert).  When I’m given a problem to solve, I start my research at the AppExchange to see how others have solved it and hoping that the perfect solution sits there ready to study, test drive and install.”

Cushanick says the ease with which one could install an app in a sandbox and see how it performs lets you know precisely what you’re getting, in a situation where you can throw your toughest problems at it and repeat the process until you either find the app you need or learn how to implement your own fix.

The Field Trip from Qandor is Cushanick’s new favorite, “maybe because it’s just for me, the admin.” Or maybe just because it’s pretty good at what it’s supposed to do. The app audits each object and describes all the fields and how often they are used, as Cushanick describes, noting that “we add 2-3 new orgs every year and backed by reports about how we are collecting data, I can advise my business on what fields are used and where we can streamline our pages.”

As of this writing, Cushanick says, there are “257 free apps from Force.com Labs. I learned as much from reverse engineering these apps as I did on the discussions boards and in the training class.

But don’t take just one All-Star’s word for it. Earlier this year TMC’s (News - Alert) Carolyn J. Dawson wrote ZenKraft, a Cloud2 firm focused on building shipping applications for Salesforce, said ts Shipmate app received the ChatterExchange AppExchange Best of ‘10 Award.

The AppExchange Best of ‘10 Award, is a customer choice award, has been sponsored by salesforce.com to firms in recognition of their ability to take customer success to new levels in satisfaction and application excellence. The Shipmate app, built on Force.com platform, is available for immediate test drive as well as deployment on the AppExchange. The AppExchange is the most-popular marketplace for world class business apps.