Salesforce.com and Google announced a new level of integration today.  At first blush, a few things stand out:

• If you're already a user of Google Apps and Salesforce.com, installation is a breeze.  We configured the framework, then added Google Docs integration in roughly 2 minutes, 17 seconds.  (Yes, we counted.)  Now we can access Google Docs, and attach them to Salesforce.com records, from within Salesforce.
• The star of the show may be Gmail integration.  With two clicks, you can now attach messages sent from Gmail -- or even chats from Google Talk -- to a Salesforce record, where it is stored under Communication History.  This means that everybody in your organization will be able to access every email sent to a particular contact, without annoying CC::ed trails or desperate attempts to remember which keyword might bring a particular message from your 3 GB email archive to the top of your search results.  Nice!
• Events from within Salesforce can be viewed in Google Calendar, giving you a timeline view of your workflow.
• The demo people at Salesforce have pretty cool jobs.  Check out their 3-D demo:

by Johanna Bates, Technology Manager, Community Partners

[Ed note: This is the first in a series of articles by Johanna Bates, chronicling her organization's switch to Google Apps.]

Google Apps. For free. Huh. I wasn’t too sure what it would do for us, but a free Google upgrade? That feels like a free box of money. After reading Sonny Cloward’s blog post, I was intrigued. I figured, “What the heck? I’ll apply and explore the possibilities.”

The application process was very simple, and Google got back to me in a few days to let me know that we’d been given the free “Education Edition” upgrade that is now available to non-profits. I set to Googling to find out more about what I could do with our Google Apps account. The calendar is nice, but we’re happy with Airset. Google Docs leaves much to be desired over our preference for online collaboration, Basecamp. But we could turn our email server into a Gmail server. Now that sounded interesting.