Salesforce recently announced that it will be retiring its Salesforce for Outlook feature, which was one of its original solutions to integrating your email inbox with your crm. The tool in its simplest form, worked quite well – but over time many organizations dealt with continued sync issues using the tool. It’s not surprising that Salesforce has decided to discontinue this tool, and push Orgs to start using some of the other solutions they have since developed. We will dive into the alternatives later in this article.
Here is the official communication from Salesforce:
“ Unlike most Salesforce products, users or IT admins install Salesforce for Outlook locally on users’ Microsoft Windows computers. It was built in a time when a cloud-based product was not easily feasible. Salesforce is a cloud-based product, which enables us to always have our customers utilizing the latest, best, and safest versions of our software. Salesforce for Outlook is being replaced by cloud-based functionality.”
Salesforce for Outlook will begin being phased out in December 2020.
Need an alternative?
If you meet the system requirements, consider moving to our next-generation products, Outlook Integration and Einstein Activity Capture. Moving to these products lets you take advantage of our latest email integration features. Plus, these products are cloud-based, which means that you get product updates automatically, with each Salesforce release.
Outlook or Gmail Integration - the Salesforce integration with Outlook and Gmail helps your reps manage their sales more efficiently. Your reps can view, edit, and add Salesforce records directly from their email, and relate emails and events to Salesforce records. The integration between Salesforce and Microsoft® Outlook® requires both server-side setup and a short client-side setup procedure. Once enabled, you can have a lighting-esque experience set in your email inbox.
Einstein Activity Capture - emails and events that you send and receive are automatically added to the activity timeline of related account, contact, contract, lead, opportunity, and quote records. Plus, contacts and events are synced between the connected accounts and Salesforce. You can read a more in-depth summary of Einstein Activity Capture’s capabilities in one of our older posts.
