My life in the cloud: Combine Salesforce and XING

Today I wanted to do a little bit of CRM – manage my Leads. I asked myself how I could utilize Salesforce.com together with XING. I searched, but did not quickly find a ready-to-use integration.

Therefore I quickly extended Salesforce with what I wanted.

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It is a lightweight integration with minimum data redundancy. Within a matter of one hour I added four links into my Lead.

1. Link to XING Profile
2. Link to XING Group Membership
3. Link to XING Messages – Inbox
4. Link to XING Messages – Outbox

These Links are calculated from the Name of the Lead, so I do not need to enter them. The only thing I need to enter is the profile name in itself – in my example FrankMichael_Kraft. Probably this can be calculated as well – if I can confirm if they are constructed.

The resulting page is displayed within the salesforce Lead. I can interact with that page as well.

So I have minimum data redundancy: I need not to copy the correspondence into the lead for example. I just use Salesforce mainly to maintain the status of the Lead.

So what I like about the Salesforce approach to CRM is:

• There are ready-to-use Business Objects – I can start in a matter of minutes.
• It is relatively easy to add new fields and links.
• The new fields and links are operative immediately. No deployment, whatever. Just run.

What I do not like so much about the Salesforce approach to CRM (as of my knowledge of today):

• I’d prefer more a social approach to CRM. I disregard mass email production. This is my preference.
• It is not clear to me how Lead Activities integrate with Email outside of Salesforce CRM.
• To add a Link you have to manually add it to every (in my example 4) layouts to be complete.
• I first missed the link construction syntax. However there was no errormessage. Just no page displayed.
• In the customization of Leads it promises to be able to change the Lead Process. But all you can do is to remove one or more of the 4 predefined statuses. This is much less than I expected.

However I am quite happy about this lean solution, that I can use right away.