Salesforce and Google are working to “assist” us a work. Tom Holman from Google, Daniel Chang and Sriram Iyer from Salesforce, and Greg Malpass from Traction on Demand presented a session on the topic at Dreamforce 2016. Tom is the product manager for Google G Suite, which Google just announced, but really is a rebranding and expansion of “Apps for Work.” Tom talked about the evolution of the enterprise and how technology has transformed it. First the “cloud” has been a key technology and puts pressure on enterprise IT to make smarter bets. Apps can no longer collect dust and platforms need to work together.
Salesforce and Google have created several integrations between their products. Lightning for Gmail, Lightning Sync, Sales Cloud for Sheets are three of the integrations described by Sriram at this session. There is now a Lightning Pane in Gmail that displays relevant Salesforce information when you are reading an email. For example, when you open an email, you can see all the open opportunities stored in Salesforce related to that email. When you click on an opportunity you can see a selected set of information inside Gmail, but you can bust out of gmail and display that opportunity directly in Salesforce in one click. The pane will also scan the email for contacts and identify any that are not already in Salesforce. Then you can add that content directly to Salesforce.
Lightning for Gmail supports sales reps who spend 23% of their day in email and calendar apps. With this integration, you can now see Salesforce records relevant to gmail emails. You can copy emails right into Salesforce and you can take action by creating new Salesforce records from inside Gmail.
With Lightning Sync you can get contacts from the google address book into Salesforce, and you can sync Salesforce contacts into Google.
Calendar events sync between Google and Salesforce. But salespeople can see Salesforce records related to appointments in the Google Calendar.
Why are these different from existing apps in the marketplace? Because they are built right into the Salesforce and Google platforms.
Integration with Google Sheets is a live integration that lets you view any list view from Salesforce directly into Google Sheets. You can make changes into the Sheet and the changes are synced with Salesforce right away. You can now use features in Google Sheets, like sorting and filtering records, update the content using the Sheets tools and keep all the changes up to date in the Salesforce platform.
These capabilities are going into Pilot (Lighting for Gmail, SIQ for Slides) and Beta (Lightning Sync, Social Studio) status in Q416 at Salesforce and will be available in AppExchange.
