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Yesterday I received an email in language which was neither English nor German (possibly Swedish and I understood only fragments) from salesforce which I assume was trying to tell me that Connect for Outlook will be discontinued.

Does anyone of you has this message or a link to this information in English?

We got a few clients who are using Connect for Outlook without an Exchange Server - just with a plain IMAP or even POP3. Last time I was playing with the new plugin Salesforce for Outlook I found that it requires Exchange, which maybe no option for my clients.

Would you recommend any alternatives to replace the old plugin with something uncoupled to Exchange?

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Here is the body of the email in English

As a salesforce.com administrator of an organization that has used Connect for Outlook within the last three months, we want to notify you of an important change to the availability and support of the application.

What is changing?

With the Winter ‘16 release*, we will retire and end support for Connect for Outlook. After the release, the application will no longer save your emails or sync your contacts, events, and tasks between Outlook and Salesforce.

Currently targeted for October 2015; date subject to change

What do we recommend?

We understand that this retirement will cause some disruption for customers using Connect for Outlook, and we are here to help. Prior to the Winter ‘16 release, we encourage you to migrate to Salesforce for Outlook, the application with enhanced features that brings salesforce.com directly into your Outlook environment. There is no cost to migrate, and you can learn more about it in the video here. To get started, please see the Salesforce for Outlook Quick Start page. In addition, you can find more information in this Knowledge Article.

Why are we retiring this product?

Salesforce for Outlook supports the latest versions of Microsoft’s operating systems and Outlook. Moving forward, we will continue focusing our development efforts on Salesforce for Outlook.

To understand salesforce.com’s philosophy on retiring functionality, please see our feature retirement philosophy here.

Where can you go for more information?

If you have any questions, please reach out to salesforce.com support by logging a ticket on the Help & Training portal.

As far as solutions that do not require exchange, there are a few options out there Outlook on the app exchange that I have heard good things about.

[https://appexchange.salesforce.com/results?keywords=outlook]

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  • Thanks ninja! Yeah, moving them to gmail could to be a viable option. Coupling SF for Outlook to Exchange was a move I didn't like for my clients. But I assume SF is using certain features of Exchange for the Integration. This limits usability and excludes a lot of smaller companies. In Germany there are a lot using IMAP. – Uwe Heim Sep 27 '14 at 11:41
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You can try Implisit. Implisit connects to your email server (supporting Gmail, Exchange and Office365) and your Salesforce, therefore working on any platform, and not requiring any client-side plugin or integration. Implisit works fully automatically, attaching emails and events to Opportunities, Accounts, Contacts and Leads, as well as creating new Contacts and Leads from the email interactions.

Disclaimer: I work for Implisit.

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