Google and Salesforce.com have teamed up to let non-profits which use Salesforce’s CRM access Google Earth to put partners, volunteers, and donors on an easy to read map. Google says that the application is a mash-up of the new Google Earth browser plug-in and geocoding APIs that will map and display the location of items in a CRM in Google Earth. Salesforce says that more than 4,000 “social change organizations” use Salesforce currently.
Here is a video showing how the app works:
Google and Salesforce say that when designing the app, they wanted to implement maps for account and non account objects, such as the opportunities or custom objects found in the Salesforce CRM application. So they designed a custom object to hold location information. This object can then be linked to any other object in the non-profits’ system, such as an opportunity to assist a village in Africa, which is called the Geo-Location object. Within the app you can input the location information of the object or the app can lookup and store that for you.
This is a pretty nifty feature and a good example of cross-cloud integration between two cloud-based applications. Although its only being rolled out for the CRM used for non-profits currently, the hope is that this feature will be extended to all of Salesforce’s CRMs soon.