Salesforce.com and Google announced a new level of integration today. At first blush, a few things stand out:

• If you're already a user of Google Apps and Salesforce.com, installation is a breeze. We configured the framework, then added Google Docs integration in roughly 2 minutes, 17 seconds. (Yes, we counted.) Now we can access Google Docs, and attach them to Salesforce.com records, from within Salesforce.
• The star of the show may be Gmail integration. With two clicks, you can now attach messages sent from Gmail -- or even chats from Google Talk -- to a Salesforce record, where it is stored under Communication History. This means that everybody in your organization will be able to access every email sent to a particular contact, without annoying CC::ed trails or desperate attempts to remember which keyword might bring a particular message from your 3 GB email archive to the top of your search results. Nice!
• Events from within Salesforce can be viewed in Google Calendar, giving you a timeline view of your workflow.
• The demo people at Salesforce have pretty cool jobs. Check out their 3-D overview:

It doesn't hurt, of course, that Google Apps and (10 licenses to use) Salesforce.com are both freely available to nonprofits. We also applaud the organizations restraint in not naming their collaboration Salesforgle.