Disclaimer: I’m a Microsoft employee.

There’s a post on The Fat Guy blog in which its author – Scott Chaffing - moans about new functionality in Salesforce.com that disables (DISables) Outlook synchronization. Nick Carr commented on Scott’s posting, but I feel Nick misses the point and Salesforce.com clearly does….or does it?

There are over 500 million users of the Office system and many of these maintain key details of their business and professional lives in Outlook. Microsoft acknowledges the benefit of sync’ing data between the Office applications – including Outlook – and business systems and helps our customers and partners build solutions to do this. The results are called “Office Business Applications” or OBAs.

There are hundreds of ISVs – including Microsoft - building OBAs and the majority of them attempt to best meet their customers’ needs. Microsoft Outlook is the primary user interface for modern CRM and all the major CRM vendors (Duet, Oracle, Microsoft, SugarCRM) offer great Outlook integration except Salesforce.com (although a Salesforce.com partner - InvisibleCRM - can help). Marc Benioff’s energies may be better spent, disabling aliens in Halo 3 instead of disabling his customers.

This InfoWorld article captures the challenge: “Benioff, outspoken as usual, said Microsoft's model of still requiring customers to install their own software instead of hosting it on the Web is ‘really screwed up.’”. Ummm…. What about Salesforce.com Offline Edition? Marc’s rhetoric is also unable to "sync" with his products.

As a Microsoft employee, I am most familiar with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and can confirm that this provides bidirectional sync with Outlook and integration with CardScan.