Salesforce And Plone Integrated
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There is one great news on the Internet these days which is more than pleasing for the whole NPO community. It claims that ONE/Northwest has received a $25,000 grant from the Salesforce.com Foundation to fund the integration of Plone with Salesforce.com. Let' see what the perspectives of such a “marriage” (as Tom Parish called it) are.
Salesforce.com is the proven leader in on-demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM). They deliver the most innovative technology and make it as easy as possible to share and manage business information. Their solutions combine award-winning functionality, proven integration, point-and-click customization, global capabilities, and the best user experience — and the result is CRM success. That's why Salesforce has earned the trust of its customers — and a customer satisfaction rate of over 97% — along with top industry honors.
Plone is the leading Content Management System for the award-winning Zope application server. Supported by thousands of developers from around the world, it is one of the most sophisticated, popular, and easy to use Enterprise Content Management Systems on the market today.
It will undoubtfully bring benefits to both of the industrial giants If these two integrate. Plone and Salesforce.com both do have unbeliavably strong communities behind them and lots of fantastic perspectives ahead. Both are widely used in the nonprofit sector — and beyond. And both have all the features needed for across-the-internet integration.
The results of such an integration, according to Steve Andersen, will be the following:
- Someone who signs up for your Plone website will be automatically dropped into your Salesforce.com database
- Any data you collect (interest area, newsletter signup, etc.) on your website will be recorded in Salesforce.com
- You can use all that data, and the constituent’s email address, to drive communication through any number of email marketing services that integrate with Salesforce.com
- If you desire, you can allow your constituents to view and change the data you have in Salesforce.com.
However, the most important thing about this integration is the mere fact that despite the existing trend of large companies to stay away from open source systems, Salesforce came to realize all the opportunities the cooperation with such a powerful system as Plone can bring and argeed to intergation.
See how Steve Andersen commented on this:
"The Salesforce.com foundation, and the corporate developer's I've talked with, have been real supporters of open source stuff. I think they feel a real kinship because of the open API concepts. Except for Salesforce.com and a few other companies, most people doing open API work have been giving it away. Whatever the reason, they've been really down with open source projects."
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