We've got good news and we've got bad news. Here’s the good news, Salesforce connector for Outlook has become a whole lot better. The bad news, as of Summer ‘14 you must be using Outlook in conjunction with Microsoft Mail i.e. you must have an Exchange server or be on Office 365. You can find more specifics in Salesforce Knowledge articles.
As the saying goes, you have to give in order to get, but I do find it kind of interesting that this came at roughly the same time Salesforce and Microsoft announced a much closer working relationship. Perhaps a little, “You Scratch my back, I Scratch yours” going on? Can’t say. Regardless it is an unfortunate turn of events for those who rely on Outlook but don’t have the means to procure a shiny new Exchange server, or don’t want to get their services from the Cloud with Office 365.
There is a bright side though. There are some alternatives. If your organization uses Google Apps for Business. The good people at Cirrus Insight have developed a wonderful suite of tools that help you integrate Google with your Salesforce instance. This is great news, specifically for those of us who live in our inbox. With Cirrus Insight for Gmail you can sync contacts and calendars, create leads and contacts, update opportunities, save emails to Salesforce, and utilize Salesforce Templates. And you can do all this from any device. They are kind of awesome. You can try it for 14 days free, and if you give us a call we can help get you a discount.
If you’re dead-set on keeping Outlook then another option is Linkpoint. They offer an Outlook to Salesforce integration with features similar to Cirrus Insight and the current Salesforce Outlook connector but with out the new prerequisites.
If you need help configuring your Salesforce instance to work with the new Salesforce Connector, Cirrus Insight, or Linkpoint we'd be happy to help.
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