One of the limitations of salesforce.com (and there aren’t all that many) is that you sometimes need to bridge a gap between the information that’s stored in salesforce.com and the tools that your company uses on a day-to-day basis.

For example, suppose a rep is using salesforce.com to track customer appointments. That’s a smart move, because keeping the data in salesforce.com ensures that the meeting stays in context with the rest of the sales effort. However, that same sales rep might want to invite people to the meeting (like customer contacts) who don’t have access to the rep’s salesforce.com system.

To invite those folks, the rep must manually copy and paste data from salesforce.com into a public calendar program, like the one offered by Google. Not only is all that copy and paste activity time consuming, it’s also error prone. There’s no guarantee that you’ll paste the right information into the right fields.

Appirio Sync for Google Calendar automatically syncs your salesforce.com calendar with your Google calendar. This allows you to share customer related events across company boundaries. It also lets you associate every event in your calendar with the right account, opportunity, lead, case, or any other custom object.

As a result, you can more easily combine your business schedule and your customer activities in an easy to share online calendar – without losing the extra perspective that comes from keeping the information in your salesforce.com database.

What We Like about It:
Sales reps hate data entry. This application can eliminate an incredible amount of busywork. Beyond this obvious advantage, three things strike us about Appirio Sync:

1. It’s very simple to install. While it requires administrative privileges to add, the process is so quick that a company can have synchronized calendar functionality in minutes.
2. It’s extremely practical. Appirio focuses on complex large- scale integrations, commercial enterprise applications, and global customer implementations and rollouts. The application is obviously a spin-off based upon the firm’s real-world experience with customers.
3. The price is right. Appirio provides Sync for Google as a free application in order to promote their integration services business.

Profile:
Partner: Appirio
Application: Appirio Sync for Google Calendar
Application Published: April 2008
Average User Rating: Five out of five stars
Pricing Plan: Free
More Info: www.appirio.com