Integrating your emails,contacts and calendar with Salesforce is one of the most valuable features you can enable for your users. It will drive adoption and make the platform work for your team. An example of this is the new Google Integration:Lightning for Gmail and Lightning Sync feature that Salesforce Summer ’17 Release offers.
Features of Lightning Sync for Google
With Lightning Sync for Google, you can assure that not only your calendar events stay synced with Salesforce, but your contacts do as well. Following are the features worth mentioning :
- Sync Contacts Between Salesforce and Google
- Keep Salesforce Events Up-to-Date
- Contacts and Events Sync More Frequently
- Two-way Synchronization of Contacts and Events
If you want to set up sync only for the events you select, you can do the event sync using Lightning for Gmail. As I mentioned in my previous blog Salesforce Summer ’17 Release : Lightning for Gmail -Part I ,Lightning for Gmail lets you experience Salesforce features directly from Google applications like Google Contacts, Gmail and Google Calendar.
Steps to set up Lightning Sync for Google:
1. Prepare Your G Suite Account for Lightning Sync
Complete these steps from Google API Console.
- Create a Google project dedicated to Lightning Sync.
- From the new project, to set up reps to sync events, enable Google Calendar API.
- From the new project, to set up reps to sync contacts, enable Google Contacts API.
- Create credentials for a service account with the role Project Owner and the key type JSON.
- Enable Domain-Wide Delegation for the service account. Doing so generates a Client ID (also known as Client name) for the service account, which you need later.
- Save the JSON private key from your service account in a secure location and share it with your Salesforce admin.
Complete these steps from Google Admin Console.
- Navigate to your security settings, select the advanced section, and click Manage API client access.
- Authorize read-only calendar scope for the service account by entering the service account Client ID (also known as Client name) you generated in Google API Console. Enter the scope:https://www.googleapis.com/auth/calendar.readonly
- Authorize read-only contact scope for the service account by entering the service account Client ID (also known as Client name) you generated in Google API Console. Enter these scopes: https://www.googleapis.com/auth/contacts.readonly and https://www.google.com/m8/feeds
2. Prepare Salesforce for Lightning Sync
- From Salesforce Setup, enter Lightning Sync Setup in the Quick Find box, then select Lightning Sync Setup.
- Enable Lightning Sync.
- Select OAuth 2.0 for Google (Beta) as your preferred connection method.
- Upload the private key for your Google service account and Save. Your Google admin generated the key when setting up the service account for Lightning Sync.
- From the Connection Test section, provide the email address for one of the reps you’ve set up to sync on your email server.
- Click Test.
Lightning Sync checks the connection between Salesforce and your email server and summarizes your connection status.
3. Lightning Sync for Google Settings for Reps
- From Salesforce Setup, enter Sync Configurations in the Quick Find box, then select Sync Configurations.
- Click New Lightning Sync Configuration.
- Enter the name of the configuration. For example, if you’re creating a configuration for reps in a particular region, enter a unique name, and then select Active.
- Assign reps and profiles to this configuration.
- Indicate the sync direction for your reps’ contacts, and select your preferred matching behavior.
- Set filters to specify the contacts reps can sync from Salesforce to Google and Save
4. Keep Salesforce Events Up-to-Date
While Salesforce provides some event functionality, such as being able to create an Event in Salesforce and then add a Contact to it, most users prefer to use their Outlook or Gmail calendar to schedule meetings. This is preferred because the invitation that Salesforce sends is a bit clunky and doesn’t sync back the attendee response to your email calendar.
If you set up reps for both Lightning for Gmail and Lightning Sync, you can select an option that syncs event updates. That way, when your reps relate an event, any subsequent changes made to that event from Google Calendar sync to Salesforce and vice versa.Because of Lightning Sync when you create an event on your Google calendar you can then add your Salesforce Contacts as invitees.In addition, Lightning Sync can sync that event on your calendar back to Salesforce related to the correct Contact record.
5. Sync Contacts Between Salesforce and Google Contacts
Now a Sales rep can keep their Contacts up to date in Salesforce, from Gmail and know that the details will automatically be synced down to their phone via their Contact address book. One can create a contact in google and can sync it to salesforce ,which will get saved as a new contact record.
Now contacts sync in both directions between Google Contacts and Salesforce. Set up reps to sync both ways so that they can create and edit contacts from the application that’s most convenient to them: Gmail or Salesforce.
Contacts and Events will now sync more frequently with Gmail.It save your reps time and eliminate unnecessary data entry .
Stay More Productive with Lightning Sync for Google.
