Appirio Cloud Sync April 2012 Release

Summary:
In this release, there are several fixes to Calendar Sync, improvements to Contact Sync, and a platform enhancement.

Details:

• Calendar Sync improvements:
• Cloud Sync now successfully syncs recurring meetings when there is a bulk trigger on the Salesforce Event object.
• This is a workaround for the Salesforce issue described here: http://boards.developerforce.com/t5/Apex-Code-Development/Bulk-triggers-in-recurring-event/td-p/83781
• Fix for I-6102/I-16559: Recurring meetings that end by a certain date are no longer duplicated if the calendar sync configuration is deleted and recreated.
• Fix for I-8898: Events where the duration is longer than one day and marked as All Day Events are now synchronized with the correct duration.
• Fix for I-14590: Recurring events that start more than 1 month in the past but that have occurrences within the sync window will now be synchronized.

• Contact Sync improvements:
• Number of records supported per contact sync configuration is increased to 5,000 from 1,000.
• Note: due to Google throttling, synchronization of data sets above 3,000 can result in longer initial sync times .  This can in turn cause the synchronization admin page to become unresponsive while it's waiting for the sync to complete.
• Contact sync duplication prevention now checks all Salesforce contact records for matching email addresses before allowing insert/update of new contacts from Google.
• This will reduce the chance of creating duplicate records previously caused when the contact sync configuration only considered a subset of Salesforce data based on visibility settings, field-level filters, or the number of records exceeding the 1000 record cap.
• Contact sync now allows users to configure which Google group to synchronize to.

• Previously, sync automatically put Salesforce Contacts into the Other Contacts group when synchronizing them to Google and if users wanted to have the data sync onward to their mobile device, they needed to manually move the contact to the My Contacts group after the data synchronized.
• Now, new Contact sync configurations support an Advanced Setting called "Sync Salesforce to Google group" that controls what group the contacts will be added to.  This defaults to My Contacts to make it easier for users that want the contacts from Salesforce to be available on their mobile devices.
• Existing configurations continue to use the Other Contacts group until edited.
• Note: data sync'd previously will not be moved from Other Contacts to the My Contacts group with this new setting, users will need to move the existing data manually, but when using a sync configuration with the new setting, any new contact records synchronized to Google will be associated with the My Contacts group. 
• Contact sync supports a new visibility filter which is the default setting on new contact sync configurations e.g. "Contacts owned by me or related to Accounts owned by me".  As the name suggests, the setting will synchronize contacts owned by the user, as well as contacts related to accounts owned by the user

• All new contact sync configurations will use this setting as the default visibility filter.
• Existing configurations continue to use their current visibility filter until edited.

• Platform improvements:
• Cloud Sync will retry after getting a login failure or license expired failure up to 10 times, each time sending an email notification to the user.  On the 10th consecutive failure, Cloud Sync will inactivate all of the user's sync configurations.
• To recover, the user will need to correct the login failure or extend the subscription, click Start and then Sync Now on the appropriate Inactive sync configuration.

For more information about Appirio Cloud Sync please visit http://www.appirio.com/technology/CloudSync.php.  For technical support please visit the Appirio Support portal and knowledge base or contact Appirio support via email at: support@appirio.com

CloudWorks September Update Arrives, Delivers More Benefits for SFDC and Gmail Users

By Wes Barkwill, CloudWorks Product Manager, Appirio

Does your business use both Gmail and Salesforce.com as part of the toolset for interacting with customers every day? Do you waste time going back and forth between the two apps preparing for a meeting or an email response, to save the details of an important email or a call, or to update a contact? Would you prefer if this was much easier to do?

If you said 'yes' to any of these questions, then Appirio CloudWorks is the answer.

CloudWorks helps accelerate productivity of organizations that use Gmail and SFDC by displaying Sales, Service, and Collaboration cloud content directly in the Gmail interface. We do this with cloud-to-cloud integration, not browser plug-ins or other client-side installs. This simple idea provides powerful benefits:

• Be More Effective: CloudWorks displays relevant SFDC content in the context of emails and meetings you manage in Gmail and Google Calendar. You use that improved customer awareness to sell more and deliver better service.
• Be More Efficient: CloudWorks allows you to view and edit existing SFDC Sales, Service, and Collaboration content, and even create new content without leaving Gmail. The time you save allows you to focus on the important work of building customer relationships.
• Be More Social: CloudWorks delivers your Salesforce Chatter feed throughout Gmail so you never miss an opportunity to collaborate when working outside SFDC. You can access and add new posts and comments to the Chatter feed for individual Sales and Service records, your entire Chatter feed, and individual Chatter notification emails you receive.
• Be More Agile: CloudWorks components are configurable and metadata driven so new fields in SFDC are recognized and can be surfaced in Gmail easily. Users see the changes immediately, there is no additional deployment effort or overhead. Cycles that typically took IT weeks or months can be delegated to business unit admin users and done in minutes.

CloudWorks has delivered these benefits since debuting earlier this year and the September update includes improvements that -

Make it easier to capture customer interactions:

• Common actions like Record Email, Log a Call, and Create Task are available on Sent Emails and all Sales and Service objects now.
• Email attachments can be saved back to SFDC in addition to the rest of the email.
• Emails from prospects can be used to create Leads or Contacts now.

Provide a more consistent application experience with SFDC and a more robust platform:

• Picklist field default values behave consistently with SFDC field-level configuration, and support a --None-- value now.
• Required fields behave consistently with SFDC field-level configuration, hardcoded required fields have been removed.
• Checkbox and lookup fields are now supported in the CloudWorks field layout editor, and will behave as expected at runtime in CloudWorks UI components.
• Other infrastructure improvements deliver a more scalable, secure, and faster CloudWorks experience.

For those of you already on CloudWorks we're excited to continually improve what you already know and use every day, the next update is scheduled for mid-October. For those of you not using CloudWorks yet, please contact us, we'd love to get you setup to start receiving the benefits mentioned above.

For more detailed information about the features, fixes, and known issues in each CloudWorks release, please see our Release Notes.

For more information and to get started with CloudWorks today, please contact us at sales@appirio.com or visit http://www.appirio.com/technology/CloudWorks.php.