That means Google's spreadsheet, text editor, calendar, instant messaging, e-mail, and other tools will work with Salesforce.com's tools, not just be available through the same interface. For example, Google Gmail e-mails can be sorted and saved in the appropriate components of the Salesforce app as leads or to-do tasks.
And Salesforce.com officials say that any third-party applications designed for Salesforce.com's AppExchange platform are automatically integrated with Google Apps. AppExchange is a marketplace of add-on software delivered through the Salesforce.com platform that uses the same APIs and database engine as the Salesforce app.
A major test of cloud computing
Should the Salesforce.com-Google effort deliver on its promise, it could help cloud computing gain serious traction businesses, including larger enterprises that have been cool to the idea of software as a service outside confined niches such as timesheet management and sales contact management. That's because both Salesforce.com and Google have a broad group of major companies that use their products separately, including Salesforce.com customers A.T. Kearney Procurement Solutions, Delta Dental, Dow Jones News Wire, and Ryder. In the meantime, Google also has its share of marquee names, such as American Express, Bank One, Jenny Craig, and Kimberly Clark.
The Salesforce.com-Google deal makes the concept of cloud computing harder to ignore, and it's part of a series of such efforts by several providers. For example, in March, ZoHo announced its multiple-application offering, the first to go beyond a specific niche such as productivity apps or CRM and instead present a broader portfolio of "cloud computing" applications. At the platform level, Google announced last week the decision to open its own platform to outside developers to deploy their own applications. And Amazon.com, Salesforce.com, Sun, and others have even more basic IT functions available through the cloud.
So far, Microsoft has put just a toe in these waters: In 2006, SAP and Microsoft introduced Duet, basically a mashup of some Office features with SAP's R3 ERP components. Via Duet, an e-mail to a customer in Outlook can pull in and view customer data from R3. Likewise, a budget in Excel or a contract in Word gives users the capability to pull up customer data from R3.
The latest Duet release includes templates that focus on specific business events such as budget monitoring and time management taking place in the mySAP business suite.
Questions as yet unanswered
Although Salesforce.com and Google have a great deal of respect and clout among users, there are still questions to be answered and requirements to be fulfilled.
The top requirement would have to be an SLA that guarantees the quality of the combined service. On this point, Google has more to prove than Salesforce.com. Google Apps is the new kid on the block, and although it does claim some big-name customers, very few if any of those customers have ripped out Microsoft Office in favor of Google Apps.
With the promised tight integration of the new Salesforce.com-Google effort, IT departments will have to expect that more of its users, especially salespeople who live in the main Salesforce app, will also be spending time in Google Apps. That eventuality will make many IT organizations expect the app quality to be the same or nearly the same as Microsoft Office, which has a huge head start in terms of functionality.
Another unknown is how well users will be able to work offline with their applications, especially salespeople who are often disconnected. Salesforce.com already allows users to download relevant portions of a customer database, such as a specific territory, so that they can keep working offline. The question is whether Google Apps will also have these capabilities.
Google and Salesforce.com have announced the launch of a jointly developed product that integrates the key features of Google Apps with the key features of Salesforce.com, the leader in web-based CRM software with more than 41,000+ corporate customers. Called “Salesforce for Google Apps,” the new product is available immediately at no cost to Salesforce.com customers, and includes tight integration with Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Talk.
As someone who once worked in a sales organization that utilized Salesforce.com, and currently depends on Google Apps daily, the integration certainly appears to be something that could be immensely useful and propel Google’s office and enterprise ambitions forward. I had a look at the four key integration points in a demo on Friday, and here’s how I’d describe them, in as non-businessy a way as possible:
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Another important piece of the partnership to note is that developers can now build applications specifically for the Salesforce for Google Apps product. There are already 7 third-party apps available at launch, with many more in the works. Through AppExchange, Salesforce has a huge developer community – think of it like the Facebook Platform but for business users, with a lot less super poking going on.
While not an exclusive deal (Salesforce.com also offers integration with key Microsoft products), the partnership is a big win for Google, as it puts their web-based office suite instantly in front of Salesforce.com’s thousands of big corporate users. It’s also a big win for web based office software on the whole – organizations who adapt Salesforce for Google Apps will essentially be saying goodbye to the days of continually emailing around attachments, scrambling to find the latest versions of documents, and leaving tons of data (email and chat correspondence) in silos.
Perhaps the question now is whether this partnership sets the stage for an eventual acquisition of Salesforce.com by Google. While Oracle was rumored to be considering a buyout of Salesforce last month, nothing seems to have materialized, and it would seem that the company’s impressive roster of customers would be much more valuable to Google, who is still a relative newcomer to the enterprise space. With a market cap of a little more than $7 billion, buying Salesforce.com would only put a modest dent in Google’s pocketbook, so, consider Salesforce for Google Apps an audition of sorts.
Getting Started
The Salesforce for Google Apps functionality is live now! To get started, go to Setup and find the Google Apps Settings menu.
Step 1 is to identify your domain. Your company must have an existing Google Apps business account to do this.
Step 2 is to enable the features you want. This will be your main control panel for managing these settings.
Some observations:
- The Add Google Docs to Salesforce feature is very cool and will be very useful! It adds onto the existing Notes & Attachments related list and lets you create/associate a new Doc, Spreadsheet or Presentation to a record. You can also look for an existing document you have and associate that. I am not sure how it handles access to the document by others. You might have to specifically collaborate with people.
I did not see any Mail Merge capabilities with this feature.
- When you enable the Google Docs tab, it adds the tab onto every application you have rather than asking you. You have to edit each application to remove it. This feature is nothing too special. Just a tab to Google Docs. I don’t see any special development Google did on their end to refer to Salesforce in their UI.
- Enabling Email to Salesforce gives each user a new Email Settings screen where they can edit their personal settings. The idea here is that you BCC a special email address and Apex code will process it and associate the email to your Lead/Contact. I tested it and attachments do not get saved.
Email to Salesforce is not limited to Google Apps. The image Salesforce has includes gMail, Outlook and Yahoo! Mail.
- Enabling gMail Buttons & Links adds a gMail link to every email address field. When you click it, a gMail window opens to compose a new email. A special Salesforce email address is BCCed on the message so that it will be processed right into Salesforce for you and associated with the record.
- Enabling the Google Talk Sidebar Component puts the same Google Talk widget you see in gMail on the Salesforce sidebar. I opted to keep this turned off as I’ll keep using my Trillian client. This feature is not pulling Contact names into gTalk. It’s simply putting your current gTalk contact list on the sidebar. You’d add people the same way as if this integration never existed.
- I didn’t try any of the 3rd party apps. At first glance the Calendar Sync and Report Collaboration sound the most interesting.
What do you think about the new functionality?
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