Wizard Systems

Keep Your Schedule Aligned: How Riva Syncs GoldMine CRM with Outlook Calendar

Staying organised in today's fast-paced business world requires seamless integration between your various tools. When it comes to managing your customer relationships and daily schedule, ensuring your GoldMine CRM and Outlook Calendar are in sync is crucial.

This is where Riva comes in. Riva acts as a bridge, enabling bi-directional synchronisation between your GoldMine CRM and Outlook Calendar, keeping your appointments and activities constantly updated across both platforms.

Here's how Riva streamlines your workflow:

1. Effortless Data Exchange:

• Riva automatically synchronises your appointments, meetings, recurring events, and phone calls created in either GoldMine or Outlook.
• This eliminates the need for manual data entry, saving you valuable time and minimising the risk of errors.

2. Two-Way Street:

• Changes made to calendar items in either GoldMine or Outlook are reflected in both platforms.
• This ensures everyone on your team has access to the most up-to-date information, fostering better collaboration and communication.

3. Customisation Options:

• Riva offers configurable sync settings, allowing you to tailor the sync process to your specific needs.
• You can choose to sync specific data fields, control the direction of data flow (one-way or two-way), and even filter which users' calendars are synchronised.

4. Improved Productivity:

• By eliminating data entry and ensuring everyone is on the same page, Riva boosts your team's productivity.
• Sales reps can focus on building relationships and closing deals, while support staff can efficiently manage customer interactions, all with the peace of mind that their schedules are accurately reflected.

5. Mobile Accessibility:

• With Riva, your synchronised calendar data is accessible from anywhere, anytime on your preferred mobile devices.
• This allows you to stay on top of your schedule and manage your time effectively, whether you're in the office, on the road, or meeting with clients.

Conclusion:

Riva's seamless integration between GoldMine CRM and Outlook Calendar empowers businesses to streamline their workflows, improve collaboration, and boost overall productivity. By eliminating data silos and ensuring everyone has access to the latest information, Riva empowers teams to work smarter, not harder.

Ditch the Middleman: Why Upgrading Your Workbooks CRM Outlook Integration is a No-Brainer - Event 6/3

Workbooks Outlook Connector (WOC) for Outlook integration is being phased out and being replaced with a superior solution,  the Workbooks Exchange Server Sync (WESS).

Join us on our next Workbooks 101 session this Wednesday 6th March 2pm UK, and we'll be explaining all.  Please register for this event.

There are several benefits to moving from Workbooks Outlook Connector (WOC) to Workbooks Exchange Server Sync (WESS) for integrating Outlook with Workbooks CRM:

Improved Reliability:

• Direct server connection: WESS connects directly to your Exchange server, bypassing Outlook as a middleman. This eliminates dependencies on the Outlook application being open and logged in, resulting in more consistent and reliable synchronization.
• Reduced reliance on third-party software: WOC relies on the Outlook Connector plug-in, which can sometimes introduce additional points of failure and require compatibility updates. WESS avoids this dependency, simplifying your IT infrastructure.

Enhanced Functionality:

• Wider synchronization scope: WESS can synchronize more data fields beyond emails and calendars, including tasks, contacts, and notes. This provides a more holistic view of your interactions within Workbooks CRM.
• Push synchronization: WESS offers two-way, push synchronization, meaning changes made in either Workbooks CRM or Outlook are instantly reflected in the other platform. This improves data accuracy and eliminates manual syncing efforts.
• Offline access: With WESS, some data can be accessed and even edited offline within Outlook, offering greater flexibility and productivity when disconnected from the server.

Additional Benefits:

• Increased scalability: WESS supports larger user bases and data volumes more efficiently than WOC, making it suitable for growing organizations.
• Improved security: WESS utilizes secure communication protocols and avoids potential security risks associated with data passing through Outlook.
• Simplified administration: Managing user access and configurations is easier with WESS due to its direct server connection, streamlining IT administration tasks.

However, it's also important to consider that migrating to WESS might require some initial setup and configuration changes. Additionally, compatibility with older versions of Exchange might be limited.

Overall, WESS offers significant advantages in terms of reliability, functionality, scalability, and security for integrating Outlook with Workbooks CRM. If you're facing limitations or challenges with WOC, making the switch to WESS is likely a worthwhile investment for your organization.

Why is Email Integration with your CRM system so important?

Email integration is a very important feature for a CRM system. Here are some key reasons why:

• It saves time by eliminating manual data entry. Emails sent and received through your email platform (e.g. Gmail, Outlook) can automatically sync with your CRM records and attach directly to accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities etc.
• It enriches customer data and history. By attaching emails directly to CRM records, you have easy access to past communications that provide context and insight about that customer or deal.
• It enables tracking and workflow automation. Many CRMs allow you to track email opens, link clicks, and automate tasks based on email activity. This helps with lead nurturing and sales follow-ups.
• It centralizes communications. With emails integrated into the CRM along with call logs, notes, files etc. you have a complete 360-degree customer view for personalized and timely interactions.
• It enhances collaboration. Sales, marketing and support teams can all benefit from shared visibility into email history and attachments within the CRM.
• It facilitates reporting and analysis. Integrated emails allow you to better analyse response rates, engagement levels, agent productivity and other metrics.
• It improves compliance. Integration helps comply with data retention policies as emails become part of the CRM record.
• Ensure consistency - Maintain your corporate style with Email Templates to ensure everyone's emails have the same formatting and branding. 

In summary, email integration eliminates silos, bridges communication gaps, provides deeper customer insights, and enables more targeted customer experiences. The right integration can transform a CRM into a true hub for managing customer interactions and relationships.

Get your Workbooks CRM system connected with 'WESS'

The Workbooks Exchange Server Sync (WESS)


We know how important it is to keep all your business critical information in one place, and we know how time consuming it can be to have to enter information into 2 different systems.

For many of you, you will be using the WESS already, while for others it may be something you haven’t yet considered. In this edition of Workbooks Wisdom, we're taking a deep dive into: how we recommend using the WESS through the Outlook Add-In; what key configuration you need to think about; and some helpful tips and links for troubleshooting any problems.

Why would you use the WESS?
When your business relies on communications with customers and prospects, as well as with stakeholders both internal and external, it’s critical to be able to see what’s going on. This is where the WESS becomes the go-to mechanism for ensuring all stakeholders in your business have visibility of your activities in Outlook. When Workbooks is embedded in your day to day operations, it’s even more important to keep everything in one single source of truth. The WESS allows you to cut down on the number of times you need to switch between Outlook and Workbooks by letting you change and update your Workbooks records whilst in Outlook.

How would we recommend you use the WESS?
When you have a WESS licence, you will also be able to use the Outlook Add-In to synchronise your emails, meetings and tasks to specific records in Workbooks. Where possible we would always recommend using the Outlook Add-In as this can, not only sync Outlook objects to Person records, but it also allows you to create, edit and update other Workbooks records. Here are some tips when synchronising different areas of Outlook:

Emails:
Where you want to automatically upload emails from a specific person, we recommend creating a rule in Outlook to automatically categorise those emails instead of using the add-in. (Please note that by using this method you can only link emails with a Person record in Workbooks, if you are linking other WB records you will need to use the Add-In)

Contacts:
If using the WESS to create People records in Workbooks, always use the add-in as this will help to identify any existing records and avoids the creation of duplicate person records.
Your "My People" view in Workbooks will synchronise automatically to Outlook via the WESS into your contacts list, so if you have a high number of Person records in your My People view, we recommend adding a filter to this view to restrict the number of person records synced as contacts.

Meetings:
We recommend creating meetings in Outlook before syncing to Workbooks. This is because you may want to use adjust the attendee list, or add a meeting link through an Outlook plugin therefore saving time and effort before clicking Save on the Outlook Add-In to sync it to Workbooks.

For more information on Workbooks CRM and the WESS extension, please contact Wizard Systems!