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Retailgeek Outlook Connector with Outlook 2010
I'm running the Outlook 2010 preview on a box, and at the moment it does not appear that the Outlook Connector for salesforce will run in it (most other Outlook plugins for 2007 that I've tried with Outlook 2010 do work fine).
I'm just curious if anyone else can confirm the same experience. Are there ever beta's of new versions of the connector, or do we need to wait for release that has official support for Outlook 2010?
Have tried it too.
Get installation error when running Outlook 2010 x64 (unsurprisingly)
Installs fine when running Outlook 2010 x86, but the Salesforce Addin crashes outlook on startup - and have to disable it for outlook to work.
Still doesn't work in the beta.
We need a solution... there should be some manual way to add these buttons and launch the process...
The connector did not work in Tech Preview or in the current beta of Outlook 2010. Though the product has not been released yet, any updates on Salesforce's progress in this would be helpful.
Is there a Beta connector to evaluate? Please help...
I need the Outlook Connector for Outlook 2010 as well.
Tom
This is very frustrating, I am testing Outlook 2010 BETA in our office as well and no connector for Salesforce.
with enough replies they should be forced to make a proper release, heck 2010 is released officially in June so time is ticking SF!!!
Get on it already otherwise I'm moving to CRM Dynamics 4.0 cloud release - much better anyways.
We need Outlook 2010 integration as well!!!
Is there any news from SF on this. I like OL 2010 - starting to look at CRM Dynamic, which seems compelling albeit a little more expensive. Hey, SF... anyone listening?
How do we push to get this in the Summer 2010 release?
With well constructed threats.
No but seriously I have been doing a little research on this and from what i've seen we are few and far between (those of us who are compelled to try out and use the latest technology) - their is not much interest from SF on this issue, they've got bigger fish to fry.
If you look at Spring 10 release they're concerned with the connector but it has nothing to do with 64bit support or outlook 2010.
PS. CRM Dynamics 4.0 CLOUD by Microsoft is a very compelling product, price is actually not more expensive depending on the edition you choose. And the integration, features for email marketing is far better than SF group edition.
//s
The first message on this thread had been viewed nearly 3400 times as of 4/30/2010 - there are a lot of Salesforce customers interested in Outlook 2010 compatibility.
Office 2010 has been released to manufacturing, so it's time for Salesforce to release a compatible connector.
Tom
SF:
I am wondering if we can at least have a date on when it is going to be released? I am doing testing on the outlook 2010 and it will be great if I can test the your connector as well.
Cheers,
Hendra
+1 desperate for Outlook 2010 support. Any chance even of a Beta for the Beta?
I'm with you on this one, you're preaching to the choir.
I'm not even sure if salesforce admins or staff look at these threads.
Folks,
Here is what I received from the SF support:
I am sorry to say that Outlook 2010 is not supported by Connect for Outlook at this time, and Windows 7 is not a supported version as well. In some instances we are able to get Windows 7 working with Connect for Outlook 2003 and 2007; however, our attempts to do so with Outlook 2010 have not been successful.
Please look for this compatibility in the future; however, I do not have any information as to when this might come to fruition.
I will go ahead and close this case; however, should you need any additional help, please feel free to log a new case, and we will do our best to be of assistance.
One more user asking for 2010 support.
Please, SFDC, I understand that you hate Microsoft, you're a new-age, cloud-based software company, Benioff came from Oracle, Microsoft is evil, I get it, I get it.
However, your users live in the real world, and are all running Office. Please - play nice with others. Give us the Outlook 2010 Connector.
Thank you.
Our office also needs outlook2010 64 bit support or we are walking from Salesforce...
Office 2010 is now launched and I am using a CRM that is not linked to my email system - something I should be able to take for granted.
If SF was a small company I could almost understand it but they are not so please sort this out as a matter of priority.
This is by no way letting SF off the hook but I am also amazed that Outlook 2010 doesn't work with Add-Ins that worked fine with previous versions of Outlook.
We were considering moving from Salesforce and this appears to be the push we needed. O2010 betas have been available for some time and for Salesforce to turn a blind eye at this really denotes the fact that Salesforce is only looking at how well they want to actually integrate with Microsoft Office. It's just a toolbar, there isn't much work that needs to be done. All of our other toolbars worked fine in our labs after the upgrade without updating the toolbars.
We also contacted Salesforce about it and got the "not available yet but should be sometime" response.
The toolbar for Outlook 2007 is compeltely incompatible with 2010. Salesforce needs to write a completely new one. But it isn't that hard. There is no excuse.
BTW, you can run Outlook 2007 with the rest of the Office 2010 suite... I was doing it but had to quit when I found that Outlook 2007 no longer had a working spell check. A spell checker is even more important than a working Salesforce toolbar.
So, thanks to Salesforce, I am again backlevel on Office 2007. Which makes me very dissappointed with Salesforce because Office 2010 has a heckuva lot of great new stuff.
Come on, Salesforce, get going on this! It might be a cool statement to say "no software", but it isn't reality.
I too just found out that Outlook 2010 doesn't work with Salesforce Outlook Connect. I use this add on many times through out the day to log emails that I send to clients. I would prefer to continue to use 2010 because of the new features. Salesforce please make this available. Thanks.
One more throwing my hat in the ring for an Outlook 2010 connector. We are considering bringing our support and service team onboard - but WILL NOT until the 2010 connector is in place.
Has anyone tried the linkpoint vue solution?
I downloaded the pre-release but in the documentation on their website it doesn't mention support for Outlook 2010.
I just don't want to uninstall office 2007 again and then have to reinstall it.
Whats LinkPoint cost?
I haven't tried it; it may indeed make up for Saleforce's deficient support.
Problem is that I can't install Outloook 2010 again to try it...
We've just been upgrading to regular Office 2010 incl. Outtlook 2010.
Urgently need the Connector working for Outlook 2010.
Can't understand where is the problem to get an Outlook 2007 Plug-in working in Outlook 2010.
Until now SFDC is the only (no) software in our company not working properly with Office 2010.
Even worse: Outlook crashes with the plugin and since I installed it has connectivity issues in our network.
Isn't there even a workaround?
LinkPoint is $ 60 per user annually or $ 5 monthly. The productivity gains and the value of the CRM data easily results in a positive ROI.
The Salesforce connector, in my humble experience, spends a lot of time crashing anyway. This is an area tthat SF needs to spend a lot more time in, including a working 64-bit version.
The means of getting into the menu is completely different for Outlook 2010, there is no way a 2007 plug-in would work. But the beta had been available for a year - SF should have been in that since it was completely open (10x million people ran it).
There are a lot of benefits to Outlook 2010, not the least of which is better management of the pst file(s) - especially very large ones. This is a new version that everybody should want and it runs great.
The only thing holding me up to going to it is the darn Connector. I haven't looked up LinkPoint yet, but I am hoping it's a complete replacement for the SF connector, with even more function. It apparently supports 2010, so if it is what I hope it is then I will be going there and leaving the irksome Connector behind.
Okay I installed on a VM the Office 2010 software + Linkpoint VUE preview trial plugin for syncing to salesforce. The idea was to test interoperability with outlook 2010 and salesforce sync by linkpoint vue.
The result:
I get an error - "API_DISABLED_FOR_ORGAPI" will not connect to SF basically. I have my SF Token setup and cannot understand why this will not work. Perhaps group edition of SF is not supported?
If anyone has tried this and had a different outcome please post or email me.
Shaun
staylor@newcomp.com
JWfisher I completely agree that the "House Brand" connector by SF is faulty and very erratic with its uptime. Often crashes for me as well.
So far Linkpoint Vue does not appear to be a viable replacement. I'm hoping that poster: LP360 can help to fix the issue.
Shaun
Shaun,
LinkPoint can only support Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited editions. What edition are you using?
Thanks,
Glenn
Thanks Glenn,
That answers my question. We run Group edition as we are a small salesforce 6-10 people.
Will wait for SF to update their plugin - which should come around sometime next century. IMHO this should have been priority 1 for SF, a 64bit , windows 7 and outlook 2010 supported plugin - not all the other updates in spring 2010 release.
I agree with the other poster - how can SF ignore a product that has been trialed by 10 million plus users and is a critical app to salesforce (Yes I'm referring to a Microsoft product - office 2010). The only reason I can think of is that SF is aiming to join Apple and all the others to further hate on Microsoft and attempt to topple them with their "no software branding" - look no further than the awesome support for Google docs in SF.
This is coming from someone implementing Google Apps at our workplace for email hosting.
Signed,
an angry sales account manager/technology enthusiast.
OK, Linkpoint is the real deal. I just learned about it from this board after complaining about the missing Oulook 2010 connector. So I reverted back to Outlook 2007 to use the connector, but now I'm running LinkPoint Vue and it is a step forward in functionality and ease of use.
I recommend you download the free application on their site and try it for yourself. Over the last two hours it looks really good. I'll be upgrading to 2010 soon if LinkPoint continues to impress.
Norm
Alexa Internet
Yes understood yopu want to sell it. But I don't want to buy it. So pls stop using a customer forum to promote your app.
As long as my SFDC set-up menu says that there is a working connector I can expect that it works and is up to date with current product releases. And btw I watched your video and LP didn't convince me.
???
SF Connector does NOT support current releases. And it breaks all the time.
The vendor has a right to be here because they are an SF partner and because we asked them to comment.
So what's the status on this one? When can we expect a working Outlook Plugin from Salesforce? This is urgent!
there is NO solution at this point.
We have been complaining in the forums about this since January 2010 (maybe earlier for others), and I've even sent tickets into tech support/fixes.
The response is they may look at it for Summer 10 release but def. not for Spring 10 release.
this is a huge disruption to our planned upgrade to office 2010 as well.
LP360: how to you get LinkPoint to add an email to SF? That's the main thing I need... all the data revealed is good but I have to add an email 98% of the time. I cna't see how to do that...
JWFisher: Here is a quick overview on how to record both inbound and outbound emails back to salesforce.com. You can also add salesforce.com library documents as attachments to outbound emails.
http://bit.ly/cru3bG
Hi all,
Yesterday I engaged a senior executive and VP of Salesforce. Rajani is the Sr. VP of Software Quality and Performance Engineering. Her response to my request on a timeline is below.
Basically she said that they are working on it for Winter 11 release which will also include a new SF client. Its not ideal but at least gives us all an expectation of how long we will wait to get a working connector.
Hope this is helpful to the community,
Shaun
-------------------------------------- Here is the email ----------------------
Hi Shaun,
I am glad to hear that you are using salesforce successfully at your company. It is of course the success of our customers that makes us equally successful.
We are working actively to build support for Outlook 2010 with the new SFO client that is currently planned with the Winter 11 release later this year. Of course this means that you will need to move to the new SFO client to use that. We are also working on adding support for 64 bit windows 7 but have not decided on a release vehicle for this yet.
I am happy to schedule a call with you to discuss our development plans for these products. Please either let your account executive or me know if you would like to discuss this further. I can have people working on these products participate in this call as well if needed.
Regards
Rajani
From: Shaun Taylor
Sent: Monday, June 21, 2010 11:05 AM
To: Rajani Ramanathan
Subject: re: Outlook Connector for Office 2010
Hi Rajani,
We are very proud clients of both Salesforce and Jigsaw, Have spent thousands of dollars with your company and have seen your stock rise.
I’d like to know which VP or C-level executive is responsible for development and updates to the Salesforce plugin for the Outlook connector. Salesforce currently does not support Outlook 2010 or Windows 7 64bit and it appears that there are no plans in the spring/summer releases to update this.
Please let me know you received this with a short reply,
Thank you.
Shaun
Winter? A full year after the beta came out (the beta 10 million of us were running).
And Win7/64 support? Just as ridiculous... given that every new PC you can buy has Win7 and very nearly every one sold is 64 bit.
This is not acceptable.
I agree with JWFisher. And I complement:
For Microsoft partners like me, the official and final release of Office 2010 has been avaliable a long time.Because of this, all computers in my office are running Office 2010. And the Outlook Connector is so important for us.
Are really too hard make an update on existing version of client?
Many other companies has updated their clients for Outlook 2010, example: Nokia, Microsoft (Activesync), Apple (iTunes sync), BlackBerry, etc.
I can understanding the fact of have a big different between a single and simple sync process rather than create a toolbar on Outlook (because I'm a developer too), but the greatest difference resides only in this fact. The rest is the same process!
We know about the difference between Outlook 2010 32 bits and 64 bits, of MAPI library. Today, others companies (said on top) have the same problem; but the most of users can accept the downgrade from 64 bits to 32 bits, like me (today all computers in office are running on 32 bits because have many clients, from many vendors or providers are functional only in this version).
First of all, sorry for my bad english. Waiting for comments.
Best regards,
Santos, Nélio.
I realize I am echoing the sentiments of several previous posts but the responses from the Sr. VP at SFDC are simply ludicrous. The Outlook Connector is a core feature of many CRM platforms and not an optional add-on. Without email desktop integration, SFDC is a significantly less effective tool. Given the already premium cost of SFDC Enterprise Edition (and rising) and its wide deployment across many CSR-type desktops, email integration is a documentation and customer service tracking mechanism imperative in supporting customers. For SFDC to merely state "Winter 2011 Release with new client" (not to mention a forced client adoption to get it) is heavy handed and not customer-focused. 6-9 months of delay following a 12 month beta of the largest email application on the planet. ARE YOU KIDDING US SFDC??
I am nothing short of appalled that a software development company of the magnitude of SFDC would blunder this badly. Whether it is a lack of resources, conflicting priorities (VMWare, Jabber other Cloud-type announcements), it is very clear that the product roadmap was severely mis-managed. Poor planning and leadership is the root of this mess and someone at SFDC should be held accountable and LOUDLY by the newly instituted Jabber community. I assure you, every IT manager in corporate managing a SFDC installation would be held to no less a standard if they upgraded the enterprise desktop to Office 2010 only to find out "oops, it doesn't work with SFDC".
Get with the real word SFDC. You have no business if manage your business like this in the Web 2.0 world. The cost to do business with SFDC is high; so should the standards by which SFDC manages the quality of its product management.
Regards,
Chris S. Barton
President & CEO
Wholesale Carrier Services, Inc.
SinglePoint Telecommunications
Deposition Conference Calling Services
G3 Networks, LLC
Right on - thank you!
Great News.
Will try it now on my Virtual Machine.
Shaun
I too am running Outlook 2010 and tried the current plug in, but it bombs every time. This needs to be updated ASAP as Office 2010 id generally available and is the current standard most people are moving to.
We neeed to know that this will be done ASAP as we are looking at CRM alternative presently that support Office 2010.
Will this (LinkVue) work to bring over the Calendar items as well?
LinkPoint Vue doesn't currently syncrhonize calendars, however, we expect that functionality to be available in 4 to 6 weeks.
Wow. This seems to have been botched badly. Even if you started today, how could it possibly take over a year from now to update a working Outlook plugin to work on Outlook 2010? A project like this should be no more than a 2 month development cycle and you all knew darned well that Office 2010 was being released in June. I can only assume that this is not something that SFDC is taking seriously. My mobile phone stays in sync just fine. Most of us just use connect for calendar synchronization anyways. I've updated to Office 2010 myself and now I am going to have to roll back just to get it to work with SFDC. I just don't see how this was overlooked. I would fire someone for this considering you probably have thousands of users out there who HAVE to use salesforce through their employer as the official CRM tool, but also need outlook. Whave you have basically done is told thousands, or maybe even tens of thousands of people that they cannot upgrade to Office 2010 until winter of 2011!
I bet I can get my organization to move away from salesforce before you can get a working synchronization tool up and running. We probably have less than a hundred enterprise users, but that won't be easy to move everything out of salesforce that is in there now. But then again, I'm a sales person. I just need to sell my organization on the soft costs associated with remaining with SFDC. So here's the deal. I'll start selling my company on something that will work with Outlook 2010 and you work on SF Connect. If you get it working before I get them to leave, or even if you can just give us some kind of simple interim calendar synchronization, you win.
This is a serious failure and anyone else that is in this situation should be doing the same at their organization as well.
I may be mistaken, but generally the "Winter" release comes out early in the year. So I'm expecting that this functionality will be available by January 2011 - still later than I'd like,but quite a bit sooner than December 2011.
I certainly hope you are right. Makes me feel a bit better. Thanks.
LinkPoint Vue's Supports Outlook 2010 and Windows 7 (64-Bit)
The main problem with Linkpoint is that there is no calendar sync. Supposedly this will be fixed in 4-6 weeks but until then, it's not useful to me.
Good point above. I've seen Dynamics and it's awesome. I'm pushing my employer to make a move but it seems that SFDC knows that we're all too far in to make a change because of all the time invested in building the databases. If MS can come up with a clean, easy, and inexpensive way to transition from SFDC to Dynamics though, that would make a lot more sense for us. I'm sure they are working on something like this. I wonder if they will have it ready before Connect for 2010.
Please do. One other concern isn't just the customer data, but also the customer reporting setup and the "dashboards" we use to track sales and activity. So it would be great to know something about that as well. Thanks!
As everyone knows, Salesforce has had the past six months to make this connection. If they had done this, it would be much easier to put it in their "winter" release. What if they miss their winter release date by six months?
I am very disappointed.
I doubt Salesforce will miss their Winter release - despite the marketing slogan, they are in fact a software company and they know how to build software. They could miss a feature, though, such as the Outlook support. Or the Outlook support might be buggy again, which for much of it's life it has alternated in and out of.
You may have noticed that Salesforce was advertising to hire a developer specifically for this feature. We can't tell if that was done or not, much less how long it could take to train the person. All this adds up to very poor support from Salesforce. And I don't understand that... did they just blow it, don't they have a product planning team, are they trying to make a pointless political statement against Microsoft, or ???
So, Salesforce, the requirement is: Outlook 2010 support, Windows 7 support (which has sold 175 million copies!), and both have to be available in both 32 and 64-bit support.
But we should also remember that Salesforce is all about add-in apps. So, now, for the rest of us, LinkPoint Vue.
I've been running this for a few weeks on Outlook 2010 64-bit with Windows 7 64-bit. It's not only a replacement for the Salesforce Outlook Connector, it provides delta function over and above the Connector (except for calendar, and that will come shortly). I can now get my emails, with attachments, into Salesforce. It's reference panel shows you what's going on in terms of emails, tasks, etc and that's a nice delta over and above the Connector.
Linkpoint Vue is very easy to trial: it's a straightforward install, minimal configuration, a couple of options. And then it works flawlessly: no bugs, no issues, it's just quietly there. And I get to enjoy the new function of Office 2010, which I'm liking a lot (especially with Windows 7). And Linkpoint Vue works just as well with the older releases of Outlook, too.
Remember that software is all about boosting your productivity - I need & want the function of Office 2010 now, not when or if Salesforce ever gets the Connector right. My business plans are not going to wait several months. Add Linkpoint Vue on top of Outlook 2010, and the combination works really well.
One little side note - if you have an idea of installing all of Office 2010 except Outlook, and then using Outlook 2007 so that you can use the Connector - forget about it. You'll find that you have no spell check function in your email. That's impossible to live with. So it's all of Office 2010, or none. And get Linkpoint Vue in either case.
I think Salesforce motto is Success not Software. Or Software with line through it...Says it all. They are not a software company. If they were it would be fixed now. Not next year. Clearly they believe the switch cost from Salesforce to another vendor is too expensive so they can hold the community to ransom and say "tough". I worked at several software companies (and was VP of Development and Service) and we never let something as major as this go so easily, we redirected resources to fix a feature so essential/critical to the community/users.
They don't value the community. The official response was pathetic.
I will be looking for alternatives such as Netsuite.
Their
Softwaremotto is just meaning no software "from them" to install on your PC. That's sort of a misnomer considering the Outlook and Office connectors plus the Offline peice and the Apex Dataloader and you need to have a browser which is software, but then you don't "have" to have Salesforce's applications installed to use Salesforce.Really though they are all about software, just not on your computer. Salesforce is just an application (software) running on a web server that connects to a database.
I must admit that Salesforce has taken way too long to have a solution for this. Being a company on the cutting edge you would figure they would have had something the minute Outlook 2010 was released.
LinkpointVue is not a substitute. It lacks calendar sync although they say that is due out soon.
My opionion? They have put a ton of money into this new "Salesforce CRM for Outlook" which is supposed to be the new bestest thing and I'm sure it is planned to sync with Outlook 2010. They probably found they were going to be 6 months to a year behind Outlook 2010 rolling it out and probably made a financial decision not to invest resources into fixing the Outlook connect which they expect everyone will discard once the new CRM for Outlook plugin comes out. They probably thought most customers would be slow to move to Outlook 2010 and figured the few that did would rather wait for them than move to a completely different platform. They maybe even calculated in the few customers that would be angry enough to leave and figured it would lose them less money than hiring people to fix the connect plugin or moving resources away from the new CRM for Outlook causing a delay.
It is "business" you know, and if I'm wrong about how this played out I would be very surprised.
I know that tool is in pilot stages right now and there are people using it. What burns me is that they have closed off the pilot to new users when what they should be doing is let people with this Office 2010 problem in on it!
Not for me - my business isn't going to wait for 6 months while they are updating a connector that never worked well anyway and will only provide basic function.
Looking at the bigger picture, Salesforce is strategically designed so that 3rd-party "apps" extend the overall functionality and (purposefully) perform most functions better than the Saleforce can natively. Salesforce tells us time and again that the purpose of their own development is to provide the base and some basic functions on top of that - no more.
There are a number of these 3rd-party add-on applications for Salesforce that we have learned we cannot do without. We see new ones in local user groups and Salesforce' own big conference. This is an attractive part of Salesforce - and no other vendor has the creative "biosphere" that Saleforce encourages and supports. The applciations become critical to our business.
LinkPoint Vue is one of these critical applications. I see it as a must-have, and functionally it will just get stronger going forward. At a faster rate and in more directions than Salesforce can or will provide with what amounts to a functional subset.
-Jeff
@megaquark
They might have made a calculated business decision. Impossible to tell the $ value. It is a clear bad customer service decision. I doubt anyone on this thread will recommend Salesforce. I won't.
How can they be the sole player that disrupts my company. Try buying a PC without Win 7? So any new hire I make I need to find a 32 bit Win 7/Vista machine. Then I hunt around and find Outlook 2007.
I prefer to admire companies when they own a problem and mistake. SF is silent about ownership. Oh well, time to move on and run my business that take customers experience seriously.
Office 2010 support is coming in the next release.
Right. We all know it's "coming". SF says it will be "Winter 2011" which is at least 6 months behind the release of Office 2010. The problem is that it isn't already here. We have jobs to do and we can't just sit around and not have basic Outlook Sync functionality that we were sold on when we bought into this $50,000 per year service. That's what the conversation is about. We can't have this broken 6 months every 3 years (the MS product lifecycle). Imagine your employees simply taking off (with pay) one extra day per week. So "the next release" is only good enough if that release is "yesterday" but even next week would be better than waiting several more months yet which is what we are being told.
I have a serious issue concerning Outlook 2010. I have installed the Outlook 2010 general release believing that Sales Force would surely ensure that its interface release was ready with the general release of MS Office 2010. Oh well so much for that thought. Now I am confronted with attempting to synchronously manually manage data in the two systems. IMPOSSIBLE! There must be a solution??
If you can, go back to Outlook2007. It will coexist with Office 2010. But make sure you uninstall Office 2010, then install Outlook 2007, then install Office 2010 customized to exclude Outlook. I'm told that will work. I did something similar and it worked for me. My install of Outlook 2010 used Home Student so it didn't have Outlook 2010. It is IMPORTANT to install 2007 first. I had several library errors.
Oh, and the machine in question has to be running Vista 32 bit to be supported (and to work reliably).
Linkvue might work for you. But no calendar which in my case makes it unusable.
Good luck. Send messages to your account rep. And to management at SF.
Blood pressure rising good luck. SF let all of us down here and I'll never recommend them. They don't even want to take responsibility.
That doesn't work entirely right - you end up without a spell checker in Outlook.
Right. Rolling back to Outlook 2007 while keeping the rest of 2010 breaks the spellchecker in Outlook. Also, if you have to revert back to 2007 for Outlook, you have defeated the purpose of the upgrade in the first place. In addition, many users don't have this optoin as new PCs are rolled out with Windows 7 and Outlook 2010. And I definitely agree...SF will NOT be recommended and as people ask me about it that's what I'm telling them.
Good Point it also causes alot of functions to no longer work requiring a full system refresh.
ie. I installed outlook 2010 found out SF were laggards in technology and reverted back to 2007; now my mail merge does not function properly and I personally do not like the group edition mail merge in SF.
Until SF fixes this issue i currently run a VM with outlook 2007 that i log into daily to sync my contacts/calendars. Its annoying as hell but only thing that works for me currently.
Like many others I will also NOT be recommending salesforce to anyone. I am stuck with it here but have used CRM dynamics by Microsoft and it is very robust.
Shaun
Wonderful - they've talked down to us all along, and have now confused the technical situation. Three more releases? Unacceptable. Where are they getting their market information from?
As usual, when you want something done right with Salesforce, you buy a third-party application. And the application in this case is LinkPoint Vue. It's perfect, it does everything we need and lots more, and very critically the vendor understands the needs of it's users and is very responsive. The product has worked flawlessly for me and I plan on using it permanently. Even if Salesforce does ever come along with the right support, LinkPoint Vue will still have more and better support anyway.
-Jeff
Not a big deal to me with 64-bit. I utilize a lot of Outlook addons and the 64-bit 2010 seems to break all of them (Salesforce included of course). So I am just against using Office 64-bit altogether because of this.
However, I am deploying Outlook 2010 to all desktops and was sad to see that still, Salesforce doesn't work on it with their desktop app. THe main purpose for us to use Outlook 2010 is to utilize the online archive function that requires Outlook 2010. So it breaks down to giving people the choice - online archive, or salesforce functionality. Since we are just learning salesforce, it will be easier to not give them any salesforce functions for now.
Off-topic - what in the world is up with the spellcheck on the forums not recognizing the word : "Salesforce". It wants to replace it with Salesrooms. Ha!
Think about all the new 64bit PCs that will be purchased between the release of Office 2010 and three Salesforce releases from now. It would appear they are testing the users to see if we will tolerate them pulling out of supporting the sync, which wouldn't be surprising considering their new relationship with Google.
Salesforce is not usable if you can't connect your Outlook to it. Customer communications have to be stored in Salesforce so that your entire team has all the information at their fingertips pertaining to every aspect of the sale and customer.
Outlook is a tremendously powerful tool and is an integral part of the sales process. I consider it to be the daily and moment-by-moment sales tool - above the importance of Salesforce. But you can't do it without both.
The sale is all-important, so I highly recommend LinkPoint Vue as an integral part of your sales toolset and the means of connecting the two. Not only does it replace the missing functionality that Salesforce blew... it provides important and powerful delta function over and above that. Give it a free trial - your team wil find it easy to use.
As a concerned customer I feel compelled to ask, do you actually have a Product Manager who rates new features & bug fixes with the user in mind rather than just with developers in mind?
I only ask because this happens to be the most important feature in my opinion & oddly, it seems you guys still haven't gotten your act together with it.
What concerns me even more is that I'm officially experimenting with Winter '11 test copy & tried this 'Upgraded Outlook Integration' with my Outlook 2010. It still doesn't work, even though this claims that it does!! I'm lost and very concerned.
Please do something before Microsoft comes out with Outlook 2020 and we all upgrade to that.
my apologies - I meant to send a private message
Marissa Thank you.
How come this is the first time anyone at an executive level has shown interest in this particular forum thread?
Shaun
I is unbelievable to me that Salesforce will not address this issue directly, when there are so many CRM choices, and so many upset customers. Every month we are ignored on such an important subject, the sting of the monthly payment grows.
Hi Mike,
We introduced a new Outlook Integration product called "Salesforce for Outlook" that works with Outlook 2010. Please note that this is a brand new product and you need to follow the following iinstructions to get started:
Step 1
Your administrator should create Outlook Configurations for your users. Administrators may choose to allow users to customize their settings, too. For complete details, see Outlook Configurations Overview.
Step 2
Users assigned to an Outlook configuration can log into Salesforce.com and download the installer from:
Setup | Personal Setup | Desktop Integration | Salesforce CRM for Outlook
Depending on their assigned configuration, users can immediately start adding emails, and their contacts and events will sync automatically.
Training video: http://salesforce.acrobat.com/winter11salescloud/
Pratima
Pratima,
We can use this today? Or is this for beta testers only still?
shaun
This doesn't mean they are going to do anything.
By "winter" Office will probably have SP1 out. Does that mean Salesforce pushes it back another 6 months?
And they still advertise Outlook compatibility!
This functionality is available going live in Winter 11. It's already available in pre-release and all the sandbox environment should be updated this weekend.
okay Group Edition does not have sandbox mode, so unfortunately will not get the preview
professional and above - which we plan to upgrade to
Shaun
I wish Salesforce would improve the communication. If Salesforce says the product is available please be clear what products it supports. Those of us (me) getting happy to finally have something that might work then learn they (Group version) can't use it. What makes Group so lacking of the ability to get access to this module. A long over due module I might add.
Can us poor Group users get this updated module? My Outlook users have been waiting and I've gotten loads of grief about Salesforce not supporting Outlook 2010, 64 bit, Win 7 etc...Of course including the obvious "did we (you) make the wrong decision to use Salesforce?" question.
Salesforce, can us Group people get access to the module?
Thanks,
To clarify, Salesforce for Outlook functionality is available on Group Edition (it's included on all the editions) starting Winter 11 and will be released in Oct.
There are 2 ways to test the feature right now:
1) Pre-release (You can signup for that here):
https://www.salesforce.com/form/signup/prerelease-winter11.jsp?fromSearch=true
2) Use a Sandbox next week (GE doesn't have access to sandbox but this should not stop them from using the new feature).
I hope this addresses your concern.
Pratima,
I'm sorry your information above is incorrect.
When you sign up for pre-release, it asks you to select your edition. Group Edition is not listed.
only:
pro
developer
unlimited
enterprise
Shaun
Shaun,
My bad, I should have been clear. You are right, we don't have GE in pre-release.
A trick for all of you; anyone irrespective of edition can sign up for pre-release and try it out. I know you might see more functionality than you have in GE but it will give you a feel for new featuers. Hope this helps.
We can't wait to get Winter release rolled out.
Pratima
thats right I am now in a 60 day trial which must be Pro edition or something similar.
anyways everything looks good, will test outlook integration later this week.
thank you,
shaun
I use the link in the message. Its not clear to me how I answer the question concerning the release as we are Group Edition. Maybe it doesn't matter?
The page states "Note that the trial account won’t contain data from your salesforce.com account.". I assume it will give me access to the integration module that doesn't know/care where the data resides? Sandbox or otherwise. Correct?
if I complete the form. I will be able to download/install the module and work with our production data? Correct?
Thanks,
The current documention for Salesforce for Outlook indicates that it too will only be 32 bit. Is this just a limitation with the pre-release version?
Also, I understand that it will no longer be possible to add email attachments to the SF contact or opportunity. This is a very serious step backwards that will hamper us. Why is this utility going away? How does SF propose we work around this?
Will support be ending for Connect for Outlook?
They are in big with Google. I can't believe these two things are not related.
Greg B,
Lack of attachment support is just a temporary limitation of Salesforce for Outlook, which we'll be addressing in an upcoming release.
You can continue to use Connect for Outlook.
Unfortunately I can not continue to use Connect on my new 64 bit laptop. I have Outlook 2007, but can not use Connect because SF does not support 64 bit. Will that be resolved in coming releases also? How long do I have to wait to get back to the functionality I had last week??
Seriously poor planning on this.
Lets think about a couple of things here -
- the great majority of new systems are shipping a 64-bit o/s and 64-bit Office 10.
- think about the limitations in PST size with 32-bit Office. 2gigs. That's too little for today's world.
- think about the 178 million Windows 7 licenses sold as of last month.. in the corporate world they are over-whelmingly 64-bit. The 32- to 64-bit migration is finally upon us.
So think about forgetting about the Salesforce support for Office. Every time you turn around there is another limitation.
Limitations are unacceptable: Office is the single most used tool in our lives. Those emails and attachments sure don't come out of Salesforce - they come out of Office and they are traded to other users with Office all around the world day in and day out. You can't do without Office.
Or Salesforce. But one good thing about Salesforce that makes up for their lack of product planning is the developer community. How many of us run Salesforce without a single app? Is it even possible? No.
So now think about an application for putting emails and attachments into Salesforce from within Outlook. It has to run on both 32- and 64-bit operating systems. And it has to work with both 32- and 64-bit Office. And it has to run on Outlook 2010 - which is also shipping by the bijillions. As well as older releases for those folks still there.
That application is LinkPoint Vue. It exists today, it supports all the above, and I run it 64- and 64-bit Windows 7 and Office 2010. It does the job, and they are a very responsive software company with an application that flat works without excuses. And you don't have to wait for Salesforce to do a "maybe someday" - it solves the problem right now. It's been available in the right combination of supported platforms for months.
So lets get with it, and then get back to work.
There are a few features that I found lacking in Linkvue. Calendaring, which they say is forthcoming. The bigger problem for me concerns sync of contacts between Salesforce and Outlook. If Linkvue had that functionality I'd completely move off and forward.
Total lack of calendaring sync makes even Linkpoint worthless to me. My schedulebeing sync'd with various other parties in the office and the ability to sync with outlook so that it's all on my exchange server is critical. Bottom line is that salesforce I guess didn't think 64 bit or office 2010 was important enough to allocate the appropriate resources to get it out within a reasonable time frame.
We will be releasing the beta version of the LinkPoint Vue Synchronization next week. Not only will LinkPoint Vue have a new improved user interface, it will also support Calendar, Contact and Task synchronization. For anyone interested in being part of the beta group, please email beta@LinkPoint360.com and let us know how many users you would like to include.
Regards,
LinkPoint360
lol. At least LinkPoint is paying attention!
The links I've seen don't yet support contacts.
The last thing I want is for SF to put a 20 dollar piece of software between me working in outlook, and the cloud.
we thought linkpoint Vue would finally be the solution, but it terribly failed in my organization. we've been trying to configure it to work with our firewall and Proxy, but it didn't work. LinkPoint Vue doesn't work behind proxy , we tried a lot ... but useless....
Hey can anyone fill me in if there is a fix for this now?
I have integreated salesforce with Miscrosoft outlook 2010, In my functionality, Salesforce send mail to the contact. It was working good in 2003, however there is issue, in 2010 mail is not reaching out to the particular email id ( that save in contact ).
Can some one please suggest me where have i made mistake ?
Add a connector
In Outlook on the web, select. > Manage integrations > Connectors.
Browse the list of connectors. When you find the one you want, select Add.
Follow the instructions on the screen to set up the connector. (Not all connectors are integrated in the same way.
Regards,
Will