Salesforce Beefs Up Office IntegrationSalesforce Beefs Up Office Integration

Salesforce.com is hitching itself to the Microsoft bandwagon. The maker of on-demand customer-relationship-management software is introducing a software development kit that will let developers use the company's sforce programming interface to build links between Salesforce.com and Microsoft Office applications. The rollout coincides with Microsoft's inaugural Office developer conference, which runs Wednesday through Friday in Seattle.

A year ago, Salesforce.com introduced an Office edition that lets users access their Salesforce.com data from Office applications. That, along with a burgeoning list of services created by the company's developer community, has led to 20% of Salesforce.com's traffic now coming via some sforce-enabled application rather than a Web browser, says Adam Gross, product marketing director for sforce. The growing demand for tools that let users work with Salesforce.com data in different ways was a major contributor to the creation of the developer's toolkit, Gross says.

The toolkit gives developers deeper integration capabilities, potentially letting users generate quotes and reports, perform mass data-cleansing tasks, and expose Salesforce.com features through portals built using Microsoft's SharePoint technology.

Neoforma Inc., which provides supply-chain-management services for the health-care industry, already is doing some data cleansing with an Excel adapter quickly built using the beta version of the toolkit, says CRM program manager Ron Hess. Hess is using Excel to standardize the way states are listed in customer records. The company's Salesforce.com users enter states in a variety of ways--as postal abbreviations, long abbreviations, or spelled out in full--making it more complicated to search for customer records by state. In the past, Hess had to write some Java code or use a data-management tool such as Pervasive Software Inc.'s Data Junction to accomplish this.

Not only does the Excel adapter speed the process of updating large quantities of data, it's increasing the quality of client information. "If I didn't have this toolkit, I would have had to write and parse all the XML myself to make this happen," Hess says. "It's like a Swiss Army knife for a data administrator."

The toolkit is available for free download on sforce.com. Developers who build Office integrations can post them to the sforce community's on-demand marketplace at that site, or they can pay about $10,000 a year to have the fruits of their development certified as sforce-ready tools, provided they have customer references. Salesforce.com doesn't participate in any transactions that occur between developers and community members.