One might have thought Salesforce, with its myriad web services, platforms and developer tools, would already have plenty of choices for its customers in terms of business collaboration options.
Turns out there are still some gaps in the offering. To fill them, the world’s No. 1 business cloud services company announced March 9 that it is going in with San Francisco neighbor Dropbox on a global strategic partnership to connect its No. 1-in-marketshare customer relationship management service with Dropbox’s collaboration platform.
The idea, Salesforce said, is to enable companies of all types and sizes to work with their value chains to better understand their customers’ thought processes as they travel across sales, service, marketing and commerce channels.
This is all about collecting data on each and every customer and remembering relevant data points (products bought, service orders, complaints, other interactions). Salesforce isn’t a storage company, and collaboration isn’t its strong point; that where Dropbox comes in.
Beta Testing Starting Soon
There is time for users to consider adding this new functionality; the beta testing program is starting soon, and implementations won’t be going live until summer at the earliest.
Off the top, the two companies will deliver two new integrations to drive brand engagement and boost team productivity:
Commerce and Marketing Cloud + Dropbox: Users can create branded, customized Dropbox folders within Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud with the new Digital Asset Engagement solution. Folders can be accessed by both internal teams and external partners. Using two-way workflows, content remains up-to-date, whether the user is working in Dropbox or Salesforce.
For example, a retailer using Commerce Cloud may create a Dropbox folder to access product images or creative briefs from an external creative agency. The retailer is notified if the agency makes changes or additions and can then update their online storefront in order to deliver a superior shopping experience.
Quip + Dropbox: User now can access Dropbox content–such as photos, videos and slides–directly within Salesforce Quip. Dropbox will also add support for Quip documents, allowing joint users to work on Quip files that live in Dropbox, furthering Dropbox’s effort to build a unified home for work.
In addition to these new integrations, the two companies will use each other’s products internally. Salesforce will use Dropbox Enterprise, and Dropbox will significantly extend its use of Salesforce products, including Salesforce Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud and PRM solutions across its business.
Pricing an Availability
New integrations are expected to begin rolling out the second half of 2018. To sign up for the Digital Asset Engagement pilot, please sign up here. Pricing will be announced at general availability, Salesforce said.