LiveOffice Debuts Outlook Email Connector for Salesforce
LiveOffice today announced Outlook Email Connector for Salesforce, giving users a 360-degree view of emails, attachments, and Chatter posts linked to an account, contact, lead, or opportunity in Salesforce without manual syncs or a plug-in.
“Plug-ins often slow down Outlook, they slow down the performance, and often even crash it,” Dean Nicolls, vice president of marketing for LiveOffice, said. “For lots of sales and support people, that’s often enough motivation not to even use the plug-in.”
The importance of “capturing a full history” was important to the application’s development. Outlook Email Connector indexes all emails, attachments, and Chatter posts in the LiveOffice cloud, eliminating storages fees associated with attachments and potential technical problems. “We’re essentially leveraging the archives to expose all of this email history,” Nicolls said. “Unless everyone within your organization is recording every touch point and email, you aren’t going to have a full history inside of Salesforce; you are going to have a partial history.”
Outlook Email Connector is “fundamentally different” than other email connectors, Nicolls said. “We rely on the archives,” he noted. “What we have done with this connector is essentially created a view inside of Salesforce that allows you to see every email sent and received for any given contact, account, or opportunity without the user having to do any kind of manual syncing or record any extra clicks.”
In addition, the connector alleviates storage problems, according to Nicolls. “Organizations can avoid all of the extra storage costs,” he said. “That’s a real pain point for a lot of folks who are transacting a lot of emails and lots of attachments.”
“LiveOffice has created an entirely new use case for archiving by actually embedding the archive inside of Salesforce.com’s user interface,” said Brian Babineau, vice president of research and analyst services for ESG as well as a LiveOffice customer.
It took about six months to develop the application, which is “in the process” of being published on the Salesforce AppExchange, Nicolls said. “The challenging part of this is the underlying technology,” he said. “On the back end, we are essentially using the same archiving functionality as we have before. The special sauce is how we deliver it.”
Outlook Email Connector for Salesforce is free and available now through LiveOffice.