Central Desktop provides a SaaS-based social technology platform, and I have written about them several times (see Wiki-based Collaborative Platform with Central Desktop and Central Desktop Using Twitter for Sales, Service, and Brand Monitoring Conversations). Last week I spoke again with Isaac Garcia, their CEO and Co-Founder who discussed the new MS Outlook integration plug-in.

The new plug-in will enable the 70 percent of Central Desktop users who already use Outlook for email to synchronize tasks, calendars and share content between Central Desktop’s collaboration platform and Microsoft Outlook. The new Microsoft Outlook plug-in will be available for download for all Central Desktop users, free of charge, and can be up in under a minute with a browser refresh.

Isaac said that their primary focus is to make managing day-to-day business operations as simple as possible without disrupting the way business teams are already working. Many people live within Outlook for much of their work day, so Central Desktop wants to allow for this while providing access to the collaborative features of a SaaS platform. 

I understood the concept but asked Isaac to give me some concrete examples of how this will work. He first took me through the calendar synch. Central Desktop has had a calendar feature for some time that teams use for their project tasks. Many of these same team members keep their personal calendars on Outlook and many of these also use Exchange server to synch with others on Outlook in their organization.  So they would have to maintain two calendars, toggle between them, and manually transfer calendar information. Now this is no longer required as the Central Desktop calendar and the Outlook calendar can be auto- synched. I think this is a great time saver and it eliminates a tedious task. Here is a calendar synch completed.

Next Isaac showed me the task list synch. Since both Central Desktop and Outlook task lists can be customized you can make them similar in structure. Even the out of the box versions can communicate and task lists on each can be updated at the same time automatically. Since Central Desktop is pure SaaS  you can easily invite others into  workspaces and share task information. You can also use it to help bridge people who are on two different Exchange servers to synch their task lists and calendars.

I asked about how the email synch works. Isaac explained that in one tool you can see the folder structure in the other. You can take an email in Outlook and place it into a folder in Central Desktop and it becomes a document within that folder. This allows others to see it and engage in a discussion on their collaborative platform rather than through the silos of email. I have been there and immediately saw the benefit of this. I wish I had it on some past projects. Here is the notification of users.

You can also set up auto-synchs between Outlook and Central Desktop to run on a schedule of your choosing. I like this bridge of on-premise productivity tools and cloud collaboration tools. It links the old school places that people still work with to the new benefits of enterprise 2.0. Isaac said the Central Desktop customer surveys consistently report a 30% increase in productivity (before the Outlook integration) and this makes sense. It should also go up now. IDC recently reported in a study that found within the organizations they studied an estimated $3,300 per employee per year was wasted looking for information. Whether this number is accurate or not, I think we can all relate to this. Linking old school desktop productivity tools with new school SaaS collaboration should cut into this number.