LiveOffice Connecting Salesforce and Microsoft Outlook

In the first bit of developer chatter ahead of this week’s Dreamforce ’11 conference, compliance and archiving specialist LiveOffice has announced LiveOffice Outlook Email Connector for Salesforce. The new SaaS offering cloud help VARs to integrate Salesforce.com messages, attachments, and Chatter social network posts with Microsoft Outlook.

According to LiveOffice VP of Marketing Dean Nicolls, the traditional plugin approach to integrating the “two worlds” of Outlook and Salesforce is lacking. For starters, plug-ins are slow and unreliable, relying on syncing at the cost of performance.

Instead, LiveOffice’s offering uses data journaling at the Microsoft Exchange (or Lotus Notes) server level for fast, transparent syncing, the company claims. The benefits include a complete archive of every user’s Salesforce messaging history and Outlook e-mail both (convenient if, say, a top salesperson leaves the company) and a more complete search experience.

A nice side-benefit is the fact that a VP of Sales or CEO can get access to all correspondence dealing with a particular account or lead across all users in their organization from one view. And as a nice side benefit, LiveOffice says it covers the costs of data storage in the final price of the offering. By comparison, Nicolls says that those competing plugins require users to spring for Salesforce’s  cloud storage fees.

The LiveOffice Email Connector for Salesforce is currently available from the Salesforce App Exchange free for a limited time. Nicolls promises that the company will have more details on how LiveOffice Outlook Email Connector for Salesforce fits into their cloud reseller program once that promotional period ends.

As a refresher, LiveOffice was among the very first cloud ISVs to offer Microsoft Office 365 archiving capabilities.

Stay tuned to TalkinCloud all week for more updates from DreamForce ’11 – especially as Salesforce aims itself towards becoming a $2.23 billion company by year’s end.