In another sign of how the lines between applications are getting blurrier in the age of the cloud, LogMeIn has forged an integration with Salesforce.com under which users of the customer relationship management (CRM) software can invoke the join.me online meeting service.
Craig Daniel, senior vice president of products for LogMeIn, says that thanks to application programming interfaces (APIs), it’s now possible to integrate online meeting capabilities within almost any application. In the case of CRM software, that integration allows sales people to engage customers in a meeting from directly within the application they use to manage all their customer accounts.
When it comes to customer interactions, context is everything. Most sales people these days tend to practically live inside a CRM application. Having to bounce between application environments in order to invite someone to a meeting can disrupt the flow of the customer conversation. But via a single click, LogMeIn allows Salesforce.com users to now fire up an online meeting.
One of the things that distinguishes the join.me service from other meeting services, says Daniel, is the speed at which an online meeting can be fired up. Having an easy, quick way to launch an online meeting is especially significant for sales people who are trying to contact customers via email and then invite them into an online meeting, says Daniel.
Soon, the lines between most cloud apps will increasingly become indistinguishable. But from this will emerge a more agile set of cloud-enabled workflow processes that will be much simpler to stitch together using APIs than anything we’ve ever used before.