salesforce.com
Salesforce.com + Google = Improved Productivity
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 demo:
Beth Kanter and the Salesforce Screencasts
Nobody chooses images to enliven screencasts quite like Beth Kanter. She can almost make you forget you're learning. In the first of a series co-sponsored by NTEN and Salesforce, she covered the integration of Google Adwords with salesforce.com. Now, she delves deeper into the uses of salesforce.com with her new screencast, "Salesforce Campaigns for Nonprofits".
By turns engaging and informative, the screencast begins by defining what a Campaign means in salesforce.com, before moving into a brief tutorial, highlighted by the very real uses of Campaigns by the Cascadia Building Council. The 13-minute presentation concludes with a series of tips and best practices from Idealist Consulting's Rob Jordan and NTEN's Holly Ross.
Go for the music and pithy speech bubbles. Stay for the expertise.