Using Salesforce and Google Docs (part I)

I will be posting a series of articles on using the newly integrated Salesforce with Google Docs. ETS uses Salesforce for incident management. We have also been "light" users of Google Docs to create and share documents and spreadsheets internally.

Installation of Google Docs within Salesforce was a breeze. Just clicked on the "get started" link and was brought to the setup module for our Salesforce instance. There were five options to add Google Docs and we added all five. Clicking on "add" for each one prompted a license agreement and then it was complete.

One minor snafu was that in order to use the integrated package, you need a Google Docs Business account. This did exist for our domain (setup months ago), but all the existing Google Docs were under my personal account.

So, in order to get the functionality you need your domain and users configured on Google Docs for Business. This is a bit of a hassle since Google has no current linkage to our email users. For example, in order for the user jdoe@domain.com to get all the functionality running on GD/SF, you need to have jdoe@domain.com defined as a salesforce user AND a user on Google Docs with all email settings configured.

I *think* this means that jdoe@domain.com needs to be setup on GD to be the primary mail client. Which of course means that you would need to setup the POP3 settings in gmail so that email will flow. More to come on this...

Another hiccup occured when we tried to create a GD from the SF interface and was prompted for the GD login. Entered the credentials for the business account, but received a "server error" on the GD side. Still don't have this working..

So basically, nothing is working, but I am confident that we will work out the configuration to getting it going. Once we do, we'll put it here.