Google, Salesforce.com join forces for business apps

In an effort to position Salesforce.com as more of a software platform and less of a sales-force automation service, Salesforce.com and Google today announced that Google will provide its Google Apps offering as part of the Salesforce.com platform.

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:

…

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?

Google, Others Expand Online Services Offerings

Google last week became the latest company to offer an application platform service on the Web. Google's offering doesn't have the heft for business use yet, but it's another significant indication that corporate users need to pay attention to the emerging array of basic infrastructure services being offered online, a trend increasingly being lumped together as cloud computing.

Google's Application Engine lets developers create and host Web apps that use a variety of online services, such as a distributed data store and replication and load-balancing services. Developers write applications in the popular Python language, and they can create links to other Google services, such as its authentication platform.

At least for now, Google says its Application Engine isn't ready for the enterprise. Product manager Tom Stocky says Google hasn't even approached companies with the service. However, Google likely will look toward business users in the future as the service evolves to include features such as offline processing and support for more languages.

SERVICES, STRUCTURED OR RAW
Google joins Amazon.com, Bungee Labs, Elastra, and Salesforce.com, among others, which offer platform-level services such as application development, database access and querying, storage, and even pure computing power as either bundled, structured suites of online services, or unbundled and relatively raw ones.

Even Microsoft is poised to more fully enter the market. It's testing SQL Server Data Services, a hosted data-storage and query-processing service, though it hasn't settled on a release date. In one tantalizing hint, a Microsoft job listing posted late last month referred to a utility computing platform code-named Red Dog, due within a year, that will offer an array of computation, service management, and storage services.

While these services are most often intended for consumers, startups, and small-business users, there are examples of big-business applications that show its potential. The bigger companies that do use these services tend to do so for hosting business and customer-facing apps. Nasdaq, for example, uses Amazon's S3 storage service to host data for Nasdaq Market Replay, an app that lets companies play back days- or months-old market data in real time. The Schumacher Group, an emergency medicine practice management company, uses Salesforce's Force.com application platform to host a homegrown database application that schedules physician visits to disaster zones. Other corporate scenarios include data backup and application testing.

S3's cheap scalability has garnered considerable interest from people working for Nasdaq corporate IT, says Claude Courbois, associate VP of product development for Nasdaq data products, but he isn't aware of any internal IT projects yet that use S3 or similar services. "When I tell people about it, they say, 'Wow, that's a really nice cost model,'" he says. However, there are plenty of situations where an online service is "a nonstarter" at Nasdaq, he says, particularly with transactional or highly secure data.

Companies still have "deep, dark fears" over security, says Adam Selipsky, VP of product management and developer relations for Amazon Web Services, who admits that applications that house critical data that requires low latency or falls under regulatory constraints may not be the best choice for hosting online. Some companies that use these services, like RSS aggregator NewsGator, say they're wary of service levels that don't live up to expectations. Amazon's EC2 service was down for an hour last week, and Google's Application Engine has no service agreements.

Despite the list of concerns and exceptions, both offerings and interest in cloud computing are increasing. It's unwise not to put it on watch.

Google, Microsoft And Yahoo Unveil Upgrades To Maps

Google, Microsoft And Yahoo Unveil Upgrades To Maps

“During the past week internet’s three major players have made headlines over making impressive upgrades to their mapping programs.”

Microsoft Live Maps Gets Impressive Improvements
Microsoft this week rolled out a slew of upgrades to its Windows Live Maps, including a major tweaks to some of its Virtual Earth 3D cities (Las Vegas, Dallas, Denver and Phoenix), that introduces a number of innovative features and enhancements to the online mapping service.

Users can now enjoy the impressive enhancements to Live Maps; they can now easily export their collection of maps in a variety of GPS formats that are compatible with just about any device: KML, GPX, and the ability to subscribe to GeoRSS feeds for a certain region.

The Live Maps team states that GPS compatibility was one of the most oft-requested features. “You can now plan your trip on the web by creating a Collection of Waypoints, and then use the Export feature to take them with you on the road,” reads the blog post.

But the Live Maps/Virtual Earth blog has a lot more comprehensive list of cool new features.

Perhaps the vital in this update, is the integration of Keyhole Markup Language, or KML. KML is the language employed to mark up personalized Google Maps—and now you can easily import your personalized map marks into Live Maps.

Another great improvement to Live Maps includes -- traffic information that is now more accurate; this is credited to Microsoft’s recent acquisition of ClearFlow, which predicts traffic on side streets, and traffic info is now available for more cities. With this, users can now have the option to select a better route based on traffic while collecting driving directions.

Watching The World In 3D
Similar to Google Maps, Live Maps has offered a bird’s-eye/satellite view for some time now (in addition to standard 2D view). But a matchless thing that Live Maps has over Google Maps is 3D view, complete with pretty 3D renderings of buildings and roads. The Live Maps team unveiled “version 2” of 3D view with this slew of updates, which is currently limited to a few select cities: Las Vegas, Dallas, Denver, and Phoenix.

According to the Virtual Earth/Live Maps blog, version 2 supports 3D-map video tours, which includes higher-resolution textures and smooth rendered trees, as well as “thousands more buildings” from inside the cities all the way out to the suburbs.

It also offers improved directions and traffic information, and also one-click directions that change the route on a map based on what direction you are coming from among a plethora of other things.

“Hundreds” other cities will further get enhanced 3D view by the end of this year, although 3D compatibility is still limited.

These enhancements make it a powerful competitor to other popular mapping services (namely Google Maps), although Live Maps could still benefit from more mindshare from the general Internet-using public.

Yahoo Maps Adds More Pictures And Extra Zoom
Determined not to be left out of the map fun fray, Yahoo has made its largest update to its imagery database since Yahoo Maps began. The Yahoo Maps and Local blog made an announcement today that they are adding more enhanced imagery to their maps.

In their broadest update so far, Yahoo states they have improved the breadth and the depth of their photographic coverage; most of the pictures are aerial views.

Almost a great deal of the update comprises of the US content, since adding on global images for a while now, Yahoo is ready to focus on pushing out updated content for its US maps.

The background data for a handful of states including California, New York, and Oregon has been improved, including a few more states from the Midwest. For genuine state maps, the color and clearness has been upped. If you wish for to get a closer look at your map content, the Yahoo maps now zoom two levels deeper for aerial and satellite imagery for hundreds of cities in the US. That indicates more detail, and eventually more useful map mashups.

Google Maps Street View Marching Forth To Australia
The Australian Fights Back

The Australian reports yesterday, that Google is taking its Street View to Australia. Unsurprisingly, privacy campaigners in Australia are as outraged as they were here.

Although Google has fought back the project, the internet company retracted when The Weekend Australian requested the personal details and addresses of the group’s key figures to allow the paper’s photographers to take pictures of their homes. “Providing those details would be completely inappropriate,” said Google spokesman Rob Shilkin.

He said Street View only carried imagery “that anyone can already see walking down a public street”.

“While Microsoft and Yahoo are improving on features, Google is busy squabbling with privacy pundits in Australia.”