Why Salesforce.com and Google Apps will Change the Game for Nonprofits

Nonprofit organizations should not need to deal with the plumbing of technology.  They should be able to move ALL of their resources on to the Internet (into the cloud) and concentrate their technical and creative talents on making the world a better place.  To date, this has been nothing more than a nice idea. However, that all changed yesterday. There are a lot of resources out there about exactly what is available and exactly what it will and will not do. 

A great salesforce.com resource is here: www.salesforce.com/googleapps.

Here's a page from Google: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/posted-by-scott-mcmullan-google-apps.html

Google CEO Eric Schmidt

First point to be made here is that, he came.  The features that are now available represent a tremendously useful first step, a great mash-up.  The fact that Eric Schmidt and Marc Benioff presented this together means that this is an alliance between two companies with supporting visions.  A computing platform is being built and both of these companies are dedicated to the success of the nonprofit sector.  For evidence of this: http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/product and http://www.google.com/nonprofits.

Joseph Mouzon - Network for Good

Next point to be made is the critical role of the social sector in this announcement and the ongoing development and adoption of this cloud computing platform.  In the video above Joseph Mouzon of Network for Good does a great job of describing the value proposition of this new integration.  And, salesforce.com has chosen this video as an effective way to get out the news to it's entire community of users. 

Blogs:

Nonprofit blogger, Judi Sohn in her blog http://www.momathome.com, has two excellent posts on this new integration.  It is worth mentioning that there is nothing uniquely "nonprofit" about her post.  She writes about what she sees as that is immediately valuable and where she sees room to grow.  A wonderful thing to notice about her posts are the comments. 

In this post

http://www.momathome.com/2008/04/google_apps_and_salesforce_-_finally_a_first_look/

A salesforce.com employee comments to fill in some information on the features of gmail to salesforce.com.

And in this post

http://www.momathome.com/2008/04/more_on_the_salesforcegoogle_calendar_sync_bug/

about an issue that she found in the Appirio calendar sync, you will notice that Appirio commented at 8:44pm that they would look in to the problem and at 3:06am reposted that it was fixed. 

The nonprofit sector is nobody's step-child!  We are driving innovation.  We are at the forefront.  Can I get a witness!?

Another great blog from NTEN is here:
http://nten.org/blog/2008/04/14/salesforce-com-google-improved-productivity

And Finally...

The new Google App Engine is LOUSING with potential.  Like I mentioned earlier, what we have seen, from a feature perspective, is a great mash-up.  After watching the video above, sit back in a comfy chair, turn on some very loud music (headphones or surround sound preferred) and think about what you could accomplish by mashing up your organization's Salesforce.com data with custom, universally available web-apps built on the Google architecture.  APEX + Google App Engine, mmmmmmmm.   Now open you eyes.  Now go build it.

"Part of the issue here is that we never build the app that you want. We build an app that you may want...  Why not build them on a common inexpensive infrastructure that has all the information on it anyway."  - Eric Schmidt, CEO Google

What we are seeing are two companies betting the bank on the success of their customers.  If, and only if, we are successful, then they are successful.  Intuitively, this makes perfect sense, yet it is strangely rare.  We have the keys to the castle and we were invited in through the front door.

Steve Wright
Director of Innovation
Salesforce.com Foundation