Our newest AppExchange listing, Enterprise Connector for Freshbooks and Salesforce.com passed the Salesforce.com AppExchange security review today.  This native integration uses batch and scheduled apex to combine Freshbooks and Salesforce in a way that lets you view open invoices by customer and view hours logged by project.  The package contains custom objects to hold your Freshbooks Projects, Freshbooks Invoices, and Freshbooks Time Entries, so you can make custom reports to fit your needs.

We have written a few Freshbooks-to-salesforce connectors over the last couple years.  Our time tracking and billing is done from Freshbooks and we manage project information in salesforce, so a connector is required.

The first version was in PHP – perfect for a proof of concept.  Next, we wrote one in Python for Google App Engine, which worked well, but then we had to manage an external service, authorize the connection to salesforce, and worry about salesforce changes that would impact the integration – plus, it was burning up API calls for the salesforce orgs that were using it.  The final version, which we just submitted for the security review for the Salesforce.com AppExchange, is completely native.  This means you enter your Freshbooks token into salesforce and then salesforce handles pushing and pulling all the data – no 3rd party servers involved, easy install, and we don’t have to manage bandwidth and storage quotas on our cloud.

Putting it all together:  If you use Freshbooks and Salesforce.com, you should follow us on Twitter @cambridgecloud or check our blog again soon to try it out.

A new application of ours was approved for the salesforce.com AppExchange:
Salesforce.com Marketing Calendar Free

This small app is intended to be a simple way for marketing to show the upcoming campaigns to the rest of the company, something that we have heard the need for over and over from our clients. It is completely free to install and use – we are preparing a paid version with advanced functionality such as printing, drag/drop rescheduling, and filtering.