Salesforce and Google Apps – Wondertwin Powers Activate
Techcrunch announced yesterday the integration between Salesforce.com and Google Apps that we (or perhaps I should speak for myself) have been anticipating for sometime. There have been rumors and teasers for couple months now, but nothing substantive from either company. While this isn’t an official announcement and there are no details to the extent of the integration, something’s coming down the pipe and I’m psyched. (Please please please integrate Gmail with sf.com!).
What does this mean for nonprofit Salesforce users? As I’ve written before, I believe on-demand applications hold a lot of promise for nonprofits. The integration of these two enterprise class applications provide us yet more opportunities to tighten our workflows, increase collaboration, decrease our data silos, lower our ICT total cost of ownership and ultimately focus on delivering our services, not technology.
One real life scenario where I can see this integration being leveraged is with the grant writing and management lifecycle:
- An organization can collaboratively write a grant and budget using Google Docs and Spreadsheets and have those documents embedded directly in an Opportunity that tracks the grant submission process.
- Both during the selection process and if the grant is won, email conversations with the grants officer can be added to the opportunity directly from Gmail.
- Progress reports to the foundation can be tracked from both systems and related to the opportunity.
- If Gcal is part of the integration, you could possibly map out your grant submission calendar from Opportunities data directly to your organization’s Gcal.
- Additionally, I could see simple Google Spreadsheets surveys being embedded in Salesforce and perhaps even the data from the surveys being pulled into an Outcomes object (I know…pie in the sky talk here).
What are your thoughts about how this could impact your organization? What are ways in which you see this integration being beneficial?
It would be wonderful to be able to send email from gmail and add to sfdc, and to sync the sf calendar with gcal. Without this integration, it’s a barrier to salesforce adoption for organizations that use google apps. Nobody wants to cut and paste between applications.
[...] announced last night the much anticipated integration with Google Apps. I haven’t had a lot of time to look at it. Judi Sohn is [...]
It seems there’s a lot of excitement about integrating g-cal with salesforce. I’m trying to figure out why you would do this instead of just using calendaring functions built into salesforce. Right now my organization is using SF but not g-cal. Is there any benefit to adding g-cal to the mix? I want it to be as easy as possible for our users to update their calendars - otherwise they won’t do it.
Laura,
I think the g-cal integration allows you to see not only your sf.com activities but your other work appointments as well. Gets every part of your work into a single place. Check out Judi Sohn’s write up for more info: http://www.momathome.com/2008/04/google_apps_and_salesforce_-_finally_a_first_look/
Here’s some reasons why we use gCal synced to SFDC calendars:
1. You can see multiple calendars at one time. While SFDC has multiple calendar support, it’s not nearly as intuitive. So a few of our folks have personal calendars, public calendars and their own “work” calendar that’s linked to SFDC all in the same view.
2. Try scheduling a meeting and inviting 5 other users/contacts in SFDC. Now do the same in gCal. It’s so much faster and easier to do in gCal.
3. gCal calendars can be shared/viewed by others (depending on how the administrator set things up). You can publish your free/busy information on the web, or present a read-only view of your calendar to a partner. You can also subscribe to calendars published from others.
4. Scheduling multi-day events in SFDC is painful (for now, I think this is due for a change in Summer ‘08) since you have to make it a daily series. It’s easy and faster in gCal.
5. There are tools for syncing gCal with Outlook, iCal, Windows Mobile and Blackberry. Folks will keep up with their calendars if they can get to it anywhere.
Some tools may not work well with hosted Gmail. Get around this by sharing your org gCal (set it to be editable) with a @gmail.com account calendar. Then you can easily use any tools that only work with Google Account calendars (as opposed to Google Apps calendars). This is how I manage my calendar on my Blackberry, using Google’s sync tool.
6. More flexible reminders in gCal, including SMS. Personally, I find SFDC’s reminders to be annoying, since it will “remind” me of a meeting hours after it passed.
On the other hand, the multi-user view in Salesforce is easier to read than the same in gCal because of how SFDC lays out the day. And we can link events to contacts in SFDC.
So no reason not to keep them in sync and use both.
Another way to increase the value of MS Outlook is to access trough it to another platform like Google or SalesForce.
We just launched KiGoo, a free tool that allows Google users to fully manage (create, read, update and delete) their Calendar and Contacts from MS Outlook.
Also KiGoo manage the Free Busy information of your Gmail contacts for appointments if they shared their FB status.
Currently we support Windows XP and office 2007.
http://www.getkigoo.com