Appirio Cloud Sync November 2011 Release

By Wes Barkwill, Appirio Product Management

Appirio is pleased to announce the most recent update to its Google-Salesforce Calendar and Contact synchronization products - consolidating and rebranding previous products as Appirio Cloud Sync, and delivering technical enhancements to improve the speed and reliability of synchronization. A few highlights about this release and related changes:

• Cloud Sync is a public cloud-based, multi-tenant application so users of previous incarnations of Cloud Sync - free sync editions Appirio Calendar and Contact Sync, and paid edition Premium Sync automatically have access to the new features without any upgrade effort.
• With the consolidation of the Appirio sync apps into a single Cloud Sync application, previous editions Appirio Calendar Sync, Appirio Contact Sync, and Appirio Premium Sync are no longer available to install from the Salesforce.com AppExchange. Customers on free sync editions will continue to have access and be supported by Appirio without cost.
• Improving reliability was a core tenet of the release so enhancements were made to upgrade support for current Google Data APIs, improve handling for larger sets of contacts data, and change options for sync frequency and the window of calendar sync to optimize the availability of the service.
• Please review the release notes for more details on the changes delivered.

More about Appirio Cloud Sync:

Appirio Cloud Sync allows organizations that use Google Apps and Salesforce.com to easily keep their calendars and contact lists in sync. The application is available for download from the Salesforce.com AppExchange, can be used on a trial basis free for 30 days, and afterward is $4/user/month. The November 2011 Cloud Sync release builds on Appirio's 4 years of experience delivering Google and Salesforce.com Calendar and Contact synchronization technology to over 20,000 users across thousands of organizations.

To learn more about Cloud Sync please visit http://www.appirio.com/technology/CloudSync.php or contact us via support@appirio.com.

CloudWorks September Update Arrives, Delivers More Benefits for SFDC and Gmail Users

By Wes Barkwill, CloudWorks Product Manager, Appirio

Does your business use both Gmail and Salesforce.com as part of the toolset for interacting with customers every day? Do you waste time going back and forth between the two apps preparing for a meeting or an email response, to save the details of an important email or a call, or to update a contact? Would you prefer if this was much easier to do?

If you said 'yes' to any of these questions, then Appirio CloudWorks is the answer.

CloudWorks helps accelerate productivity of organizations that use Gmail and SFDC by displaying Sales, Service, and Collaboration cloud content directly in the Gmail interface. We do this with cloud-to-cloud integration, not browser plug-ins or other client-side installs. This simple idea provides powerful benefits:

• Be More Effective: CloudWorks displays relevant SFDC content in the context of emails and meetings you manage in Gmail and Google Calendar. You use that improved customer awareness to sell more and deliver better service.
• Be More Efficient: CloudWorks allows you to view and edit existing SFDC Sales, Service, and Collaboration content, and even create new content without leaving Gmail. The time you save allows you to focus on the important work of building customer relationships.
• Be More Social: CloudWorks delivers your Salesforce Chatter feed throughout Gmail so you never miss an opportunity to collaborate when working outside SFDC. You can access and add new posts and comments to the Chatter feed for individual Sales and Service records, your entire Chatter feed, and individual Chatter notification emails you receive.
• Be More Agile: CloudWorks components are configurable and metadata driven so new fields in SFDC are recognized and can be surfaced in Gmail easily. Users see the changes immediately, there is no additional deployment effort or overhead. Cycles that typically took IT weeks or months can be delegated to business unit admin users and done in minutes.

CloudWorks has delivered these benefits since debuting earlier this year and the September update includes improvements that -

Make it easier to capture customer interactions:

• Common actions like Record Email, Log a Call, and Create Task are available on Sent Emails and all Sales and Service objects now.
• Email attachments can be saved back to SFDC in addition to the rest of the email.
• Emails from prospects can be used to create Leads or Contacts now.

Provide a more consistent application experience with SFDC and a more robust platform:

• Picklist field default values behave consistently with SFDC field-level configuration, and support a --None-- value now.
• Required fields behave consistently with SFDC field-level configuration, hardcoded required fields have been removed.
• Checkbox and lookup fields are now supported in the CloudWorks field layout editor, and will behave as expected at runtime in CloudWorks UI components.
• Other infrastructure improvements deliver a more scalable, secure, and faster CloudWorks experience.

For those of you already on CloudWorks we're excited to continually improve what you already know and use every day, the next update is scheduled for mid-October. For those of you not using CloudWorks yet, please contact us, we'd love to get you setup to start receiving the benefits mentioned above.

For more detailed information about the features, fixes, and known issues in each CloudWorks release, please see our Release Notes.

For more information and to get started with CloudWorks today, please contact us at sales@appirio.com or visit http://www.appirio.com/technology/CloudWorks.php.

CloudWorks Summer Updates 2011

From expanding our configuration capability, and allowing users to comment directly on Chatter notification emails in GMail, to improving application load times and administration console look-and-feel, the CloudWorks team has been busy this summer releasing significant improvements in June and August.

June highlights include:

• For Service Cloud users, the ability to create a new Case from an inbound email
• Configurability of fields for edit and/or display on Cases, Leads, and Campaigns
• New "Reply to Chatter" app that shows you the full Chatter post/comment stream for emails that contain links to Chatter (e.g. auto-notifications from SFDC)
• Pre-population of more fields when adding emails and new contacts to SFDC
• Totally new CloudWorks Console look-and-feel user interface
• Admins can now selectively license only certain users to see CloudWorks, instead of their entire email domain
• Ability to override "matches" logic that determines if and when CloudWorks standard apps should fire, making it easier to substitute your own business-specific logic

August highlights include:

• Performance optimizations to the CloudWorks platform will result in substantially faster load times for the Contact application after initial caching.
• For the first time, CloudWorks now supports Internet Explorer 8 and 9.
• Several improvements have been made to the Record Email feature to more accurately capture email details in salesforce.com
• Log a Call and Create Task actions now allow users to set more fields.
• Tenants can now restore the original 'factory default' CloudWorks application field layout and stream configurations when necessary.
• Dozens of other UI and platform fixes improve usability, security, and reliability throughout CloudWorks.

For more detailed information about the features, fixes, and known issues in each CloudWorks release, please see our Release Notes.

Each release of CloudWorks improves the ability to make your workforce more effective and productive. Your staff has the benefit of having the right information when and where they need it in their email and calendar applications, are smarter about their customers and have better interactions as a result, and can easily capture outcomes and make necessary changes to keep your business information current.

For more information and to get started with CloudWorks today, please contact us at sales@appirio.com or visit http://www.appirio.com/technology/CloudWorks.php.

CloudWorks May 2011 Release

By Glenn Weinstein, CTO, Appirio

Appirio's CloudWorks May 2011 release is now officially available! All tenants will automatically see all of our new features.

Please see the May 2011 Release Notes, on the "Documentation" tab of the CloudWorks console, for a comprehensive review of what's included in this release. Highlights include:

• Configurable fields - you can now select which standard or custom Salesforce fields for display and edit on the Contact, Account, and Opportunity apps
• Activity stream - you can optionally display latest Activities, instead of latest Chatter, for record details
• App Chooser - allows users to select other CloudWorks apps in addition to the currently displayed matching app
• Create a Contact - you can now specify Title, Phone, and Mobile
• Debug mode, which allows users and Appirio support personnel to see detailed debug info to help diagnose problems
• Prototype versions of CloudWorks apps for Box.net and Jive
• Support for Salesforce orgs that enforce IP range restrictions
• Better handling of situations that previously required users to clear their browser cache
• "Quick Start" configuration for newly created CloudWorks tenants, to make it easier to create demo or test tenants

The Getting Started guide should be helpful for onboarding new users.

We believe CloudWorks is an industry-changing product for companies that are moving significant portions of technology to the public cloud, via leaders such as Salesforce.com and Google Apps. Please contact us at sales@appirio.com, or visit http://appirio.com/cloudworks for more information about getting started with CloudWorks!

Check It Out - The CloudWorks April 2011 Release

By Glenn Weinstein, CTO, Appirio

Yesterday, we went live with the April 2011 release of CloudWorks!

If your company uses Salesforce.com for CRM, and you're using Google Apps for email and calendar, then you need CloudWorks.

It's fun to be part of an R&D team building a true multi-tenant SaaS application. We are running five-week sprints, culminating in regular releases that each contain great new features and enhancements that make our customers more productive. The bad old days of 1-2 releases a year (at best) are a distant memory! And when we release, all customers get the improvements immediately. Our release notes say nothing about how to "install" the new version. It's a relief to not have to worry about all the permutations of upgrade scenarios our customers may face. Another ancient memory of an older era in software.

You can read the April 2011 Release Notes for the gory details, including lots of screen shots and explanations. It's avaialble straight from the "Documentation" tab of your CloudWorks console. Highlights include:

• "Edit" button on contact, account, opportunity, lead, and campaign details
• Case app, for showing details about a support case inside any email with a thread id
• "Push to Salesforce" button on Google Calendar sidebar app, to copy an event into SFDC and tie it to the appropriate records
• Support for connecting to multiple SFDC orgs
• Support for multiple email domains, if they are being managed centrally in one Google Apps control panel
• Gmail app "decider" logic, allowing admins to configure which apps to show, when, and to which users (this moves more control from custom programming, to admin configuration)
• Use of SFDC REST API
• Black tabs, allowing Appirio support personnel to administer customer tenants

The Getting Started guide gives step-by-step instructions for onboarding new users.

We look forward to your feedback.

CloudWorks March 2011 Release Is Here!

Appirio's Cloud Technology Group is very pleased to announce the March 2011 release of CloudWorks.

CloudWorks is our innovative technology for surfacing cloud-based data - specifically, your Salesforce.com CRM and custom Force.com data - in a meaningful business context, such as your Gmail or Google Calendar.

Customers use CloudWorks to improve sales productivity through their CRM systems via better data quality, more updated pipelines, easy activity creation, and realtime information when and where users need it. They also use CloudWorks to incorporate custom processes, such as recruiting, timecards, expenses, even idea voting - right into their mail and calendar apps.

Put simply, if you have SFDC and you have Google Apps, you need CloudWorks.

The March 2011 release is a significant step forward:

• We now have a full-fledged administration console, available from the More > menu in Gmail, or directly at http://cloudworks.appirio.net. Here, we've consolidated all of the developer and admin functions, as well as a new "My Settings" tab that allows individual users to inspect their SFDC Oauth tokens, and de-authorize or re-authorize to a new org.
• We've added an email contextual app for Leads and Campaigns. Now, if you receive an email from a sender who's not a contact in your SFDC CRM, we check to see if that person is a Lead, and if so, we'll show you the relevant info.
• You can now create a Contact in SFDC right from Gmail, anytime you receive an email from someone who's not listed anywhere in your CRM.
• This is our first release of production-quality documentation, including a Getting Started guide for end users, a Standard Apps guide, a developer's guide for Building Custom Apps in CloudWorks, and much more.

Of course, CloudWorks is delivered as a secure, multi-tenant SaaS application, so there's nothing to install or maintain.

Please contact us today if you have SFDC and Google Apps and want to try CloudWorks, or even if you have SFDC and are thinking about a move to Google Apps!

Updates to Professional Services Enterprise (PS Enterprise)

Appirio is thrilled to announce the newest upgrade to the Professional Services Enterprise (PSE) product, which contains several exciting new features.

Read more here...

Note: As of Jan 1, 2011, Professional Services Enterprise, an application formerly provided by Appirio Inc. on Force.com, is now owned, developed and supported by FinancialForce.com.