Since jumping on the Google Apps Enterprise bandwagon, a couple of Google Apps to Salesforce.com integration requirements have started to emerge.

 

It now feels that we have 2 systems of record for our customer contacts and the path of least resistance to contacting a customer is now through our shared contacts database in Google Apps. This results in the CRM system (which is supposed to be the system of record) getting out of sync with day-to-day operations.

 

I'm not sure that the Google API allows us to log each email activity with clients in Salesforce, but it does appear to support integration between Salesforce Contacts and Google Contacts through the Google Provisioning API.

 

Calendaring is another area where Google has now become our primary means of managing events and meetings, but Salesforce is the system of record for things like Contract and Asset expirations, which drive our subscription billing process. I'd love to have an iCal feed from Salesforce into Google Apps that gives everyone visibility into customer related events. Even better, I'd love Google Calendar events to flow back into Salesforce with 2-way sync (Perhaps just an iCal mash-up on the Salesforce Console Page will suffice?).

 

It's doubtful that Google Apps will ever match the Salesforce Opportunity and Campaign management features, nor provide the workflow and reporting flexibility required to run an enterprise (although I don't doubt many small businesses will use Google Apps for basic CRM). But clearly Google Apps is emerging as the Office 2.0 suite of choice and it's positioning and integration relative to CRM and ERP solutions will follow a similar path that Microsoft Exchange and Office have taken today, albeit within an SOA context.

 

This is all very exciting stuff. There's even talk around our water cooler of creating an "i-Dialogue for Google Apps" solution to enable tighter, enterprise-class interactions between employees, customers, and partners. We'll of course dance on the bleeding edge and test these concepts out on ourselves first.