Consistent with CEO Benioff's opinion of Microsoft, Salesforce.com to launch mail plug-in for Thunderbird

I'm not sure whether it's just that I lucked into the news scoop or that some forward thinking when it comes to information technology ended up in some connected dots that might not have otherwise been connected. Over the last two weeks, for the events company that I run on the side (Mass Events Labs), my partner and I decided to purchase two more "seats" ("seats" sometimes takes the place of "licenses" when comparing on-demand subscriptions to shrink-wrapped software) of Salesforce.com. The two people who need access -- one for sales, the other for attendee management -- send e-mails that that in true CRM fashion, need to be tracked and archived for historical reference. But in both cases, the users prefer to work with a locally run e-mail client like Microsoft Outlook.  Currently, Salesforce.com has a plug-in for Outlook so that when the time comes to send an e-mail to someone, you can choose to send it as regular e-mail or as Salesforce e-mail. In the case of the latter, a copy of the mail is deposited into the Salesforce.com database where it gets associated with the relevant records in the contact database, campaigns database, etc.

So far so good, right? Well, not really. First, Outlook is the only local e-mail client supported. Second, what this means is that in order to get the benefit of e-mail client integration, one must purchase a copy of Outlook (Outlook Express, the version built-into Windows is not supported) or a copy of Microsoft Office Professional (which includes Outlook). Third, not only does Salesforce.com's CEO Marc Benioff have a track record of berating Microsoft Office and everything its stands for, I recall reading (I can't find the link right now) that he had discussed ridding his own company of it altogether. Naturally, I assumed Salesforce.com might have some other alternative in the works.

It does.

Yesterday, I learned that the company is on the verge of releasing the beta version of a plug-in for Mozilla's open source e-mail client Thunderbird. For a small company like the one I'm part owner of this is good news. What this means is that for every new "seat" I add to our Salesforce contract, in addition to what Salesforce charges for that seat, I won't also have to buy a copy of Microsoft Office or Microsoft Outlook. Second (even better), Thunderbird is available as a download. So, it's really easy for me to get someone up and running over the phone. I just direct them to Mozilla's Thunderbird download page, have them download the software, and, once the Salesforce.com plug-in is available, I can walk them through the installation of that. What would be really cool is if salesforce.com repackages the installation files for Thunderbird in a way that it installs with the plug-in pre-loaded.  

Officials at salesforce.com expect the beta to be release sometime in the next days or weeks. I'm sure to be blogging about it once it turns up.