Salesforce.com links with Microsoft Office

Salesforce.com has created a plug-in for Microsoft’s Office that allows users to import data from the Salesforce.com online CRM service into Word, Excel and Outlook, the company said Wednesday.

Salesforce.com has created a plug-in for Microsoft’s Office that allows users to import data from the Salesforce.com online CRM service into Word, Excel and Outlook, the company said Wednesday.

“The service is the server,” said salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff at a launch event in San Francisco.

Salesforce.com Office Edition is available to all Salesforce.com customers at no charge. The software is easy to install and creates new pull-down menus in the Office applications, allowing users to sign into Salesforce.com and pull data from the CRM system, Salesforce.com representatives said.

The plug-in for Office was created using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and works with Office 2000, Office XP and Office 2003, according to Salesforce.com. VBA ships as part of Office and is the Office language that macros are written in.

Adding the software allows users to retrieve data only, not work on data in Excel or Word and then upload it to the Salesforce.com system. Uploading data is possible but requires more, probably custom software development, said Peter Gassner, a Salesforce.com senior vice president and general manager.

“Data retrieval is pretty straightforward. There are more varied scenarios when you talk about putting data back into the system,” he said. “We may over time have a very generic bidirectional system that will work for all customers.”

The download feature provides several benefits, Gassner said. These include the ability to automatically generate customer proposals in Word by merging data from Salesforce.com with a Word document, and the ability to analyze data in Excel, he said.

Meanwhile, Salesforce.com customer Magma Design Automation is creating its own integration with Office. Sales representatives at the chip design software vendor will be able to upload sales proposals drafted in Excel to the Salesforce.com system through a custom-made tool, said David Brooks, director of CRM at Magma.

“Salesforce.com gives you a little functionality and then they give you the hooks around it to do more,” he said. Magma has also bolted a custom bug-tracking system on top of the Salesforce.com application, taking advantage of the APIs exposed by the online service, Brooks said.

The Office plug-in and Magma’s custom tools are made possible by Salesforce.com’s Sforce platform, announced in June last year. Sforce allows developers to create their own hosted applications and lets customers and ISVs build extensions to the Salesforce.com service.

Salesforce.com claims to have about 8,400 customers and 120,000 subscribers. The San Francisco-based ASP filed papers last month for an initial public offering later this year.