George Schlossnagle has a new posting over on his blog today about an expansion of his company (OmniIT) and their sales department's move to SalesForce.com.

The Salesforce.com windows integration seems to be excellent, there are nice tools for syncing Outlook addressbooks, calendars and such with Salesforce. Now, as most of you who know me know, I'm a Mac guy. [...] The problem is that the Mac integration with Salesforce seems to suck. Salesforce works fine under Firefox, but as far as integration into the Mac desktop tools - uh uh.

So after a couple doublebooked appointments, I worked out a couple syncing tools to help merge my environment with the sales team: Salesforce.com calendaring, ICS file, Salesforce.com Contactlist, Setting up our Cisco 7940 to use a custom external directory to allow account and contact navigation. I did all this with PHP5's SOAP extension to interface with Salesforce.com's SOAP-based integration API. Overall, this was pretty easy.

It's always cool to see integration with established tools made so easy through PHP (and SOAP). Personally, I see it as a sign of stability and flexibility for a company to offer a way for outside customers/clients to interface with an API and make their own tools...