Getting Started - My First Sync

Appirio Cloud Sync allows you to synchronize contact and calendar information between Salesforce.com and Google in one easy location. It consolidates free Appirio products and provides more functionality, better usability, adds administrative capabilities, and is fully supported. For those upgrading from free Appirio products, there is no migration, everything just works!

My Setup

The first time you click on the “Cloud Sync” tab you will be asked to re-enter your Salesforce.com and Google Apps usernames and passwords. This information lets Appirio Cloud Sync access and connect information from your Google and Salesforce.com calendars and contacts.

Note: If after entering your Salesforce username and password you receive an error indicating you are locked out, you can contact your Administrator to whitelist Appirio’s server, or you can place the Salesforce security token on the end of your password. Click here for more information on security tokens.

Login Requirements

We require your Salesforce and Google username and password to enable the Sync process to occur in the background, without user intervention. This is not possible to do with sessions (since they expired after a few hours) or any other mechanism. Your passwords are always encrypted (RSA, 1024 bits) on our server, never sent or received in the clear, and never shared with other applications or companies. Our applications have passed Salesforce certification, providing independent verification that they are safe for use.

New Calendar Sync

After successfully entering your user information you will see the main synchronization screen.

Click the “New Calendar Sync” button
Select a direction for the synchronization (Bi-directional, Salesforce to Google, or Google to Salesforce)
Choose how often information should be synchronized
Choose a Google Calendar to synchronize information with (normally your default calendar)
Choose if you would like to be notified of any issues with synchronization via e-mail
Choose the conflict resolution (default is the most recent change wins)
Click “Save” or “Save and Start Sync”

At this point you will be returned to the main page. This page will give you the status of the synchronization, when it was last run, and a link to see the synchronization log.

If you did not “Save and Start Sync” you will need to “Start” your synchronization. Once a synchronization is started it runs in the background. You only need to return to this page if you wish to stop the synchronization, change settings, or view its status.

That’s it! With this one-time setup, calendar events from your Google and Salesforce calendars will seamlessly flow back and forth without any intervention.

New Contact Sync

After successfully entering your user information you will see the main synchronization screen. Simply edit the options or leave the defaults to begin synchronizing in seconds.

Click the “New Contact Sync” button
Select which of your Salesforce Contacts to synchronize (default is all you have access to)
Select which of your Google Contacts to synchronize (default is everything in Google mail, i.e. every person you have sent an email to)
Select who wins if there is a conflict (default is Salesforce)
Select what stay in touch options you would like to use (default is to take no action)
Set advanced options related to how to handle deletes in Google, how frequently to sync, and whether to receive emails if a sync error occurs
Click Save and Start Sync

At this point you will be returned to the main page. This page will give you the status of the synchronization, when it was last run, and a link to see the synchronization log.

That’s it! With this one-time setup, your contacts from Google and Salesforce contact lists will seamlessly flow back and forth without any intervention.

For Administrators

Appirio Cloud Sync allows administrators to view information on every user in their org. You can monitor information on their sync settings, including frequency, type of information configured to sync,, and their activity logs. This also allows you to start, stop, reconfigure or setup a user's synchronization preferences.

As an administrator, when you login, you will see an additional drop down that allows you to select the user's sync configurations you would like to see. Administrators do not have access to the passwords of any user.

Calendar Synchronization Options

Several synchronization options are available:

Direction – The default is to synchronize information bi-directionally so updates made to one calendar automatically update the other. In some circumstances you may wish to only have information be updated in one direction (e.g., updates only flow from Google to Salesforce).
Frequency – How often a background synchronization is run. More frequent synchronizations will result in more up to date information.
Google Calendar – Google allows you to setup multiple calendars (e.g., my work calendar, my class schedule, etc.). You must choose one of these calendars to synchronize information with.
Notifications – The Google and Salesforce calendars have a number of incompatibilities (see Known Issues). For example Google support class schedule recurrences (occurs every Tues/Thurs or Mon/Wed/Fri) and Salesforce does not. Calendar events that utilize any of the incompatible features will not be synchronized. Receiving notifications sends you email when events cannot be synchronized. Notifications can be turned on and off at your discretion without interrupting the synchronization process.
Conflicts – These settings determine how conflicting event updates are handled. A conflict happens when the same calendar event is changed in both Salesforce and Google within the same synchronization period. If Most recent update is selected, the last change is synchronized, the other change discarded. Selecting Salesforce or Google means that the selected system is always used as the synchronization source in a conflict. Note that if the same event is deleted in one system and updated in another, the event is deleted from both systems.

Multiple Synchronizations

You can create up to 3 independent synchronizations. This can be used to merge multiple Google calendars into Salesforce, or to publish a Salesforce calendar into multiple Google calendars.

The product prevents the creation of synchronization “loops” - defined as a calendar that is used as both a source and target. For example, you cannot create a synchronization from Salesforce to Google Calendar 1, then from Google Calendar 1 to Salesforce again. Instead you would create a single bi-directional synchronization between the two.

Contact Sync - Setting Salesforce Filters

Setting filters allows you to synchronize only a subset of your contacts. If your Salesforce user has access to thousands of contacts, you can set filters to only synchronize a subset of those.

Filters can be based on:

Overall - All, None or Custom - If All or none are selected, all or no contacts from Salesforce will be synchronized with Google
If Custom is selected additional options become available:
- Filter By Ownership - This allows you to constrain the list of contacts to be synchronized based upon ownership, valid values (from broadest to most narrow) are:
  - All Contacts I have Access to
  - All Contacts owned by users sharing my Role
  - All Contacts owned by users sharing my Profile
  - All Contacts owned by me
- Filter By Field Values - Using data fields within the contact record, you can further restrict which contacts to synchronize. This works similar to a Salesforce view. For text field, wild cards can be used at the beginning or end of a field (*Smith for the name field returns all contacts with a name ending in Smith).
  - Example of common field value filters - contacts that have been updated in 2011, contacts only in California
- In all cases, you can only synchronize contacts that you have access to within Salesforce (e.g. Salesforce security setting still fully apply)

Contact Sync - Setting Google Filters

Setting filters allows you to synchronize only a subset of your contacts. If your Google account has access to thousands of contacts, you can set filters to only synchronize a subset of those.

Filters can be based on:

Overall - All, None or Custom - If All or none are selected, all or no contacts from Google will be synchronized with Salesforce
If Custom is selected additional options become available:
- Filter by group - This option allows you to select all or a subset of contacts to sync based on contact groups in Google.
- Filter by primary email, exclude contacts from domains - This option allows you to exclude contacts in your Google address book from certain domains (e.g. gmail.com, yahoo.com, etc.)
- Filter by name exclude contacts with empty names - In Google, you may have may contacts that do not have a name (only an email address), you can choose to exclude these from the synchronization. If this is not selected, for Google contacts without a name, the email address will be used as the name

Contact Sync - Determining Conflict Resolution

Conflict resolution refers to two distinct components:

Data Conflicts - If information on a specific contacts (e.g. phone number) is in conflict between Salesforce and Google, which source is authoritative and should update the other.

In all cases, only data in Salesforce contacts you own will be updated by information from Google.

Contact Sync - Stay in Touch Settings

Stay in touch is a feature inside of Salesforce that provides you an easy way to get up to date information from your contacts. Appirio Cloud Sync plugs into that to allow you to gather new information from Google contacts with limited information.

All your contacts and new contacts as they are added - For each contact that you currently own (and are within the Salesforce filter you have defined) and for all contacts that will be added to Salesforce, send them a stay in touch email
Only new contacts as they are added to Salesforce (Default) - For all contacts in Google that are added to Salesforce, send them a stay in touch email to gather their full and complete information
Do not stay in touch at this time - For all contacts do not stay in touch or get their latest information

Contact Sync - Advanced Options

Advanced options allow you to control additional sync behaviors including whether to ever delete Salesforce contact data if the contact is deleted in Google, how often to sync, and whether to receive email notifications if there are ever sync errors.

Delete Permission - Specifies whether to allow Salesforce contact records to be deleted if the same record is deleted in Google
Sync Contacts - Specifies the sync frequency
Exception Notification via E-mail - Specifies whether to receive email when there is an error during sync

Understanding the Activity Log

After setting up a synchronization you can always view its latest status and in the activity log, information about which contacts were recently synchronized. The activity log is viewed by clicking the link in the Last Sync column. The activity log includes information on what contacts were synchronized, what direction they came from, and any errors that may have occurred. This view is also used when previewing a sync.

Known Issues and Limitations - Contact Sync

Contacts without an email are cannot be synched - Google does not support contacts without email addresses
Only up to 5000 contacts can be synchronized in a single sync setup
Any Salesforce contact you can see can be published to Google, but only those you own can be updated or included in stay in touch emails
Duplicate contacts will only synchronize to single a contact owned by you (Salesforce only allows one contact per email address, Google will allow for many contacts with the same email address)
Contacts with email address greater than 80 characters are not supported (salesforce limitation)

Known Issues and Limitations - Calendar Sync

There are significant differences in the capabilities of the Salesforce and Google calendars. In some cases, it is not possible for an event in one system to be accurately translated to the other. It is important to be aware of these limitations when relying on synchronized calendars for accurate information.

The table below describes all known limitations. The Activity Log and E-mail Notification features are helpful in pointing out the impact of limitations when synchronizing your calendars.

Support	Issue	Impact on Calendar Sync
Not Supported	Salesforce does not allow updates to EventAttendee.	Information about who is attending events is not synchronized.
	Salesforce does not expose recurrence exception information.	Recurrence exceptions (changing or removing one instance of a weekly meeting) cannot be synchronized.
Limited Support - Reminders	Google supports multiple reminders, Salesforce does not.	Only the first reminder will be synced with Salesforce. If the Google event contains multiple reminders and the Salesforce event is changed, the first reminder in the Google event is replaced with the reminder from the Salesforce event.
	Salesforce events which are all-day and contain a reminder cannot be directly mapped to Google. Google doesn't support absolute time reminders, and this is required for all-day event reminders.	When an all-day event with a reminder is synchronized, the reminder is ignored. The original event's reminder is untouched, but the synchronized event will not contain the reminder.
	Events in Salesforce cannot exceed 12 hours 45 minutes in duration (with Multiday Events disabled for the organization), or 14 days in duration (with Multiday Events enabled for the organization).	Events in Google that exceed 12 hours 45 minutes or 14 days in duration (depending on the Multiday Event setting in Salesforce) cannot be synchronized. (To enable Multiday Events, go to Setup > App Setup > Activities > Activity Settings).
Limited Support - Recurrences (Series)	Google events that end on a specific date will be synchronized to Salesforce with the correct number of occurrences, but series that are configured to end after a certain number of occurrences in Google will be handled as if they have no end date.	Series that end after a certain number of occurrences in Google will sync to Salesforce with the documented maximum number of occurrences supported for the series frequency.
	The following Google recurrence pattern is not supported in Salesforce: Yearly Every n Years where n > 1.	Google events using these patterns will not be synchronized to Salesforce.
	The following Salesforce recurrence patterns are not supported in Google: Yearly On The 1st/2nd/3rd/4th/Last/Day of Month, Daily Every n Days (where n > 14), Weekly Every n Weeks (where n > 14), Monthly Every n Months (where n > 14).	Salesforce events using these patterns will not be synchronized to Google.
	Salesforce limits the number of recurrence instances for an event. The limits are 100 for daily, 53 weekly, 60 monthly, and 10 yearly. For example, an event beginning on Jan 1, 2008 recurring daily until Dec 31, 2008 is not allowed - 365 instances would be required but the limit is 100.	Google events with more recurrence instances than Salesforce allows will be truncated to fit within the Salesforce maximums. This does not modify the original Google event.
	Google's Calendar user interface supports a subset of the iCal specification for recurrences.	Events that contain BYMONTH, BYMONTHDAY, or SETPOS cannot be synchronized. This typically occurs in events that are published into Google from outside sources, such as Microsoft Exchange. In general, recurrence patterns that can be created directly via the Google Calendar user interface are fully supported - with the exception of those covered in this documentation which are unsupported by Salesforce. We are investigating ways to support additional patterns.
	Salesforce User Profile and/or organization may not have access to all of the required fields, preventing use of the product. The product requires the following fields of the Salesforce Event object to be Visible: All Day Event, Created By, Date, Description, Duration, Location, Subject, Time. For bi-directional and Google to Salesforce synchronization, these fields must not be Read-Only. Support for Reminders and Private events is optional.	Based on user feedback we may relax the field requirements in the future.

More Help - The Appirio knowledge Base

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