Posted by Jay Rivard on Thu, Mar 18, 2010
The vast majority of our clients use Salesforce CRM in conjunction with Microsoft Outlook. The Outlook Connector Client is very robust and has proven itself to be reliable. That is not to say that there are not minor bugs that show up from time to time. In response to this, salesforce.com updates it quite frequently. In the "Desktop Integration" section under "Setup" you will notice an option to check for updates. We recommend that you do this once every month. If there is an update you will see the release notes associated with it. If the changes are significant you should upgrade to that new release.
Posted by Bill Goulette on Tue, Jan 05, 2010
A driving force in adoption of any CRM application is often tied directly to the ability of the CRM application to integrate with the end user's primary communication and planning tool -- Microsoft Outlook. A solid integration with this application plays a critical role with end user buy-in. Many sales efforts are won or lost based on a good Outlook integration.
What many evaluators tend to overlook is that Microsoft Outlook becomes unstable with add-ins. I have seen add-ins from Skype, Microsoft, Salesforce and many others cause Outlook to hang, crash, restart and force mail store file scans. Many other blog postings (on various websites) have addressed these specific issues in detail. The goal of this blog is only to identify the fact that the add-ins are not necessarily the problem.
The matter then is really that Microsoft Outlook is overly cautious about capturing the potential errors sometimes leading to instability of a once-stable key end user application. Understanding this before evaluating any software integration with Microsoft Outlook is critical.
Sometimes conflicts can occur between various add-ins. It is important to understand which add-ins your users are currently employing so that you can research which combinations tend to cause problems. Prior to purchasing any CRM application it is important to aggressively test drive the trial offer from a CRM application ensuring that you work the Outlook integration. For on premise users, this means testing it within your network environment.
Understanding that Microsoft Outlook sometimes behaves badly with add-ins will prevent un-met expectations and a lot of frustration down the road.