Do you or your users have a long list of folders in Outlook for storing emails? Is it hard to search for/find the email you need? Is it tedious to have to look in Outlook and in salesforce.com for your emails and sales history? Do you wish you had one place where all of the information could be stored?

There is an easy way for sales reps to manage their communication with their clients in salesforce.com. Outlook Edition provides integration between salesforce.com and Microsoft Outlook. This gives users the ability to add emails they send and receive in Outlook directly to a contact in salesforce.com.

Getting Outlook Edition

To download Outlook Edition, go to Setup-Personal Setup-Desktop Integration-Outlook Edition.

Outlook Edition has many options on how to sync up data. You can add all of your outlook contacts to salesforce.com, add all your salesforce.com contacts to outlook, decide who will win on changes to the data, choose to sync tasks and events, map custom outlook fields to those in salesforce.com and default an object to relate your messages to.

In my organization, we decided to not sync over contacts in either direction because it created large amounts of bad/duplicate data in both Outlook and salesforce.com. We also decided not to sync tasks or events. All we did was put the integration on each users Outlook to give them the options to add emails, cases, task or events.

Using Outlook Edition

Outlook integration puts buttons in outlook like the ones below:

When a user sends or receives an email, s/he can save the email in salesforce.com by clicking the Add Email button. When the button is clicked, a search for the sender/receiver is made in salesforce.com and a wizard pops up displaying the results. This wizard gives users options like picking a different contact to add it to, adding it to a related object or changing the email message that is added.

An added benefit of Outlook Edition is the ability to access salesforce.com directly in Outlook. Outlook Edition will add a folder titled salesforce.com to your folder list. If you click on that folder, salesforce.com will open right in your Outlook window.

Outlook Edition Benefits

This makes it really easy for sales reps to keep track of their communication with their clients right in salesforce.com. They no longer need to keep an outlook folder for all of their clients. They can just add the emails directly to their salesforce.com contacts. This also simplifies finding messages because if you know the sender/receiver, you can look in their contact activity. If not, you can do an Advanced Search to find anything content in the email.

Best of all, when a user leaves the company, their saleforce.com activities stay behind for all to see. You can have a smooth transition of client information to a new user down to the actual emails that were sent. That is a powerful tool to keep sales/revenue numbers consistent through company turnover.

Outlook Edition is easy to use and is a must have for salesforce.com users. It drives adoption, ensures continuity of territories and makes it easy to organize communication. Go get it today!