Run Even More of your Business in the Cloud

Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead; Maureen Bradford, Product Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise

On the Google Apps team we talk a lot about collaboration, and it's usually around user benefits of sharing documents, teamwork on Google Sites, and the like. But we also collaborate with an ecosystem of innovative partners to roll out complementary products that customers are quick to adopt, before asking for more.

One request we often hear is to help streamline customer relationship management, or CRM. Today we're responding in a big way with Salesforce for Google Apps, an integration of two enterprise-class application suites. Available today from Salesforce.com, this new product offers powerful yet easy-to-use productivity tools for smarter management of customers, sales and marketing.

It's natural that we'd collaborate with Salesforce given our shared belief that Enterprise computing's future lies in SaaS. With over a million subscribers, Salesforce brings deep understanding of CRM processes and the market expects this level of integration from the two SaaS leaders. Together we focused on several customer needs:

• Tighter teamwork: Avoid the hassle of version control or attachments by using Google Docs right in Salesforce to jointly craft a proposal in real-time - without leaving the browser.
• Increased efficiency: Log Gmail messages in Salesforce to track customer communications and keep the team in sync.
  
• Faster communication: Instantly communicate during customer service calls with Google Talk right in Salesforce, archiving chats for the rest of the team to reference.
• Simpler coordination: Share and sync sales, marketing, and personal calendars with check-box simplicity and drag-and-drop convenience.
  

To see some of this in action, check out the product tour, or get a quick overview here:



It's easy to get started. Salesforce for Google Apps is now available to all salesforce.com customers at no additional cost, so you can integrate any edition of Google Apps into any edition of salesforce.com for free. Salesforce will also resell Google Apps Premier Edition, giving customers a single point of contact for deployment and support.

By the way, thanks for everyone's ideas. Our collective efforts are driven by requests from our users, and partners such as Appirio and Astadia are listening too. They're among the first companies to take advantage of the new development opportunities from our collective open APIs. You can find their enhancements in Salesforce's App Exchange and the new Google Solutions Marketplace.