Cirrus Insight vs SalesForce for Outlook

A common use case with SalesForce is needing the ability to integrate your email and calendar.  And because of that there is many tools that can help you do it.  Two of the common ones are Cirrus Insight and SalesForce for Outlook.  But, given that, what makes one of them a better choice than the other?

Well, let's look at the pros of Cirrus Insight:

• It's in the cloud - it automatically updates itself as needed.  With SalesForce for Outlook you have to do this manually
• It's available for more users - since Cirrus works right in Google Apps, along with Office 365.  Unfortunately SalesForce for Outlook only works with Outlook
• It provides more in-depth information, from SalesForce, about what is going on.

So, given the above, what is the benefits of SalesForce for Outlook?  Well, compared to Cirrus Insight there isn't much SalesForce for Outlook can do that Cirrus can't.  But SalesForce has other tools in their arsenal.  An example of one is SalesForce IQ.  SalesForce IQ integrates with Google Apps and provides many of the same features as Cirrus.  So it will be interesting to see what else happens in this space.  

SalesForce Lightening Release

Now that SalesForce Lightening is generally available, it's time to think about if you should implement it in your org.

It is an amazing new interface for SalesForce and helps address many of the common complaints about the current SalesForce UI.

SalesForce Lightning UI with Sales Path highlighted on an Opportunity

The above being said, the new UI is still far from being fully ready.  For most orgs, the Lightning UI is not a complete enough solution to yet implement.  That is because many common functions, listed below, aren't yet supported:

• Forecasting
• Opportunity Splits
• Lead Merging/Duplication
• Cases (specifically Comments and Entitlements)

This all being said, the improvements to Dashboards are great and can outweigh some of the above.  Now you can truly make a customized dashboard that looks professional.  And of course, with the new UI you can turn it on for only certain user groups.

To help you decide, here is a quick video/overview that lets you the pros, and cons of Lightning.  You can see it here.