Re: CRM on Demand

Google and SalesForce.com are shooting for that approach:
http://www.salesforce.com/products/google/apps/gmail.jsp

Thanks for the link. It struck me to read about sending Gmail messages from Salesforce. It parallels the approach I took with my recently completed email client.

I subscribe to this WEB400 mailing list under my Yahoo email account, but view and respond to messages using an email client which I wrote, running under my portal, on my server. I just cross-reference my portal user profile with my Yahoo email account, and it appears to others that I'm sending and receiving via Yahoo.

http://www.radile.com/rdweb/temp/cml140.html

If you look at the email headers on mail received, you can see the message being sent from my server. I just bypass Yahoo's blaring advertisements, and sub-par performance.

That's not really a high degree of integration. It's mostly appearance, to a casual observer. I'm not sure if Microsoft Dynamics is more integrated with Outlook, or if it's just that IE is embedded in Outlook.

Integration with Outlook and Exchange is a talking point that's getting a lot of emphasis from Microsoft. They even go so far as saying that Salesforce is losing business to Dynamics because of it. So Salesforce returns with a message about its integration with Gmail. Actual design is often lost in the marketing message.

One type of integration that really makes sense to me with respect to a CRM package is to link contact addresses with a service like Google maps, so you can easily visualize where a contact is located.

I'm still not sure where XML fits into the mix.

Nathan.