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?
