Thursday, 09 February 2012
Connecting the Cloud, One Contact at a Time Print E-mail
Monday, 18 August 2008 17:16

Ryan Nichols

Most businesses ultimately depend on personal connections. Business people would be lost if they couldn’t connect everyday with the contacts in their address book. And businesses wouldn’t function without the rich web of connections among their employees, partners, suppliers, and customers. But your company’s contact database is almost certainly incomplete. Despite periodic reminders from management to “scan those business cards” and “import those contacts,” most people can't find the time to maintain this information unless they are forced to, regardless of the benefits to the company. Your personal address book is also incomplete. Sure, you may have a rich virtual rolodex of names, mobile phones, and email addresses, but you can't see how this person is related to your business right now.
  • Imagine you’re writing a casual email to reconnect with a former colleague—who happens to be in the midst of making a big purchase with another department in your company. What if you had this sort of business context at your fingertips whenever you communicated?
  • Now imagine that your company’s sales reps knew about this connection as they were putting together their proposal. You would have been happy to make an introduction—if they’d only known to ask.
Appirio Contact Sync for Salesforce and Google Apps

Today, we’re excited to announce Appirio Contact Sync for Salesforce and Google Apps. This offering extends our portfolio of solutions that connect the leaders in on-demand - Salesforce.com and Google - allowing users to easily synchronize calendars, collaborate on marketing campaigns, find and embed documents, and create and share customized CRM dashboards.

As with our other offerings, we’re starting with simple synchronization—you choose which of your contacts you want to share, and how you want them synchronized between your Google and Salesforce address books. This is a valuable start. Today, your Google email account automatically stores the email address of everyone you’ve ever written to, but knows nothing about their companis or roles. Your Salesforce.com contacts are detailed, but you’re missing hundreds of critical business connections. Synchronizing the two solves a real pain point that we hear from our customers today.

Contacts in Context
Sync is just the beginning. Appirio's vision is to bring the business context from all of a company’s on-demand enterprise applications into the productivity tools and social networks that individuals use as they work. We want "Solutions for Business" + "Solutions for People" to finally create "Solutions for Business People."

Contacts is the center of that vision, and sync between Google Apps and Salesforce is a great place to start. Enjoy the offering!