Salesforce.com and Google announced a new level of integration today.  At first blush, a few things stand out:

• If you're already a user of Google Apps and Salesforce.com, installation is a breeze.  We configured the framework, then added Google Docs integration in roughly 2 minutes, 17 seconds.  (Yes, we counted.)  Now we can access Google Docs, and attach them to Salesforce.com records, from within Salesforce.
• The star of the show may be Gmail integration.  With two clicks, you can now attach messages sent from Gmail -- or even chats from Google Talk -- to a Salesforce record, where it is stored under Communication History.  This means that everybody in your organization will be able to access every email sent to a particular contact, without annoying CC::ed trails or desperate attempts to remember which keyword might bring a particular message from your 3 GB email archive to the top of your search results.  Nice!
• Events from within Salesforce can be viewed in Google Calendar, giving you a timeline view of your workflow.
• The demo people at Salesforce have pretty cool jobs.  Check out their 3-D demo:

Nobody chooses images to enliven screencasts quite like Beth Kanter. She can almost make you forget you're learning. In the first of a series co-sponsored by NTEN and Salesforce, she covered the integration of Google Adwords with salesforce.com. Now, she delves deeper into the uses of salesforce.com with her new screencast, "Salesforce Campaigns for Nonprofits".

By turns engaging and informative, the screencast begins by defining what a Campaign means in salesforce.com, before moving into a brief tutorial, highlighted by the very real uses of Campaigns by the Cascadia Building Council. The 13-minute presentation concludes with a series of tips and best practices from Idealist Consulting's Rob Jordan and NTEN's Holly Ross.

Go for the music and pithy speech bubbles. Stay for the expertise.

Google and salesforce.com recently reminded us of their new relationship, plugging the extension of their respective grant programs to nonprofits. Current recipients of donated salesforce.com licenses are eligible to apply for the Google Grants program, and through it, gain free AdWords. And Google Grantees are eligible to apply for the salesforce.com Foundation's product donation program. Ah, reciprocal relationships make me smile.

Being signed up isn't enough, though: you still have to learn how to use these programs effectively. To that end, check out our webinar on "Salesforce for Nonprofits", and then watch the fabulous Beth Kanter's screencast on integrating salesforce with AdWords (as previously covered in our blog).

The growing user community of Salesforce and the Salesforce Foundation have releases a wiki documenting the nonprofit template; one of the main customizations for nonprofit use that Saleforce has released.

The wiki can be found here. It is a very useful resource for nonprofit thinking about or implementing Salesforce in their organizations. As many of you know, the Salesforce Foundation offers the powerful CRM (constituency relationship management) platform free to nonprofit (up to ten seats). The Foundation also offers a grant program that is aimed at development and dissemination of nonprofit applications and customizations useful for the sector.

We here at NTEN use Salesforce (albeit not with the nonprofit platform). The Salesforce Foundation is also an underwriter of the National Technology Conference.