Getting Started - My First Sync

My Setup

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

• 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 servers, 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 Calendar 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 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 their is a conflict (default is Salesforce)
• Select what stay in touch options you would like to use (default is for new additions only)
• Set advanced options on how to handle unstructured Google address and name data
• 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.

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. Contact Synchronization run in the background once a day.

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

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 2008, 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

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 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
  • 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.)

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.
• Filter Conflicts - If a filter in one system includes a contact for synchronization, and a filter in the other system excludes that same contact what should happen. The system that wins will determine if the contact is synchronized or ignored. E.g. if "Joe Smith" exists in salesforce but is not included in the Salesforce sync filter, but also exists in Google and is included, will the contact be synchronized or not.

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

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 Contact Sync for Google and Salesforce 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

Advanced Content Options

Certain fields inside of Google are not structured. This means that a single field (e.g. name) contains multiple components of data (first name, last name). Advanced options allow you to determine how to parse through that data.

• Google Name Handling - How should the Google name field be parsed into a first and last name. Options are:
  • Last word is last name, remainder is first name
  • First work is first name, remainder is last name
  • Ignore middle words, use only first and last word
• Google Address Handling - In Google, addresses are handled in a single text area. Salesforce requires information to be parsed out into its component parts. Data and separators must be in the correct order with no extraneous data:
  • Line Separated - Street, City, State, Zip, Postal Code, and Country are fields separated by new lines in the text area
  • Comma Separated - Street, City, State, Zip, Postal Code, and Country are fields separated by commas in the text area.

Understanding the Contact Sync 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

• 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)