gokubi.com

At the Salesforce Nonprofit Roadmap Summit we did an exercise where we drew out what the future of Salesforce and nonprofits looked like. My group did a three banded timeline–one band for the development of the nonprofit salesforce community, one for the building of a nonprofit-specific functionality, and one for the progress of the underlying sf.com platform. Ryan captured our report out on video if you’re interested.

In our report out, you’ll hear me predict that sometime in 2008, Salesforce will release their groupware offering. I fully expect Salesforce and Google Apps to be closely integrated in the near future, and was reminded of that today when Google released a new API for Google Docs.

I’m hoping for a Gmail integrated Salesforce that lets you point your Salesforce org to your Google Apps account. Then it would populate your Address book with all your Contacts and Leads. I’d love to see emails that you send drop right into Salesforce. All events would sync to your google calendar.

Files in Docs and Spreadsheets (and soon Presentations) could be tagged with sf.com records, and then be discoverable via sf.com. Google Desktop could even crawl your sf.com database to make the entire database full-text searchable.

There is even the potential, though cookies, to have Google Analytics report back to you directly on what your constituents are looking at on your website, helping you better target their interests.

I think deep integration like this would immediately be more appealing than Microsoft Small Business Server for lots of groups. On Demand, low cost, tightly integrated, and extensible.

I’d love to see something like this in the next year. Anyone else think this would be a compelling offering?

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 10:09 am and is filed under CRM, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.