Use Offline Edition as a backup in case salesforce goes down

It isn't often, but there may be a time in the future when salesforce.com goes down. I know, I know.... you're thinking "Never, no way, never happen" and all that stuff. But, there's no way that any software as a service provider can stay up 100% of the time. Just like there's no way that any in-house, hosted CRM solution that your own company maintains could stay up 100% of the time.

So, in the event that salesforce goes down, what are you going to tell your sales team to do? They can't work , right? Their productivity goes to zero. Well, salesforce.com has an answer.

Although this tool wasn't designed to be used in the event of a salesforce failure, you can still use salesforce's Offline Edition to keep working if an outage occurs. The Offline Edition is designed to be used by travelers who are in and out of connectivity. They can install Offline Edition on their laptop, synchronize it with their live salesforce.com data, go get on a flight, and use Offline Edition to work on salesforce (stored locally on their laptop) as they are traveling, even when they don't have connectivity.



Once they regain connectivity, they can sync Offline Edition with the live salesforce and all the changes that they made to their Accounts, Contacts, Leads etc. are updated.

Use Offline Edition as a Backup
In the event saleforce goes down, you can use Offline Edition to keep up and running and avoid productivity losses. The catch is, every day, you have to keep your local copy of Offline Edition synced with the live salesforce. If you have a synced version of your data sitting on your desktop or laptop, and salesforce.com goes down, you can switch to Offline Edition until the live salesforce comes back up.

How do you sync every day without it being a pain? After you've installed Offline Edition on your desktop/laptop, you can then set up a "Windows Scheduled Task" which will automatically open up Offline Edition each morning. After it opens, you can simply click a few buttons and tell it to sync (while you are going about your daily activities) then you can close it.

To install Offline Edition, and then set up a Windows Scheduled Task follow these instructions:

-While using Internet Explorer (not Firefox), go to sf.com and then go to Setup>Desktop Integration>Offline Edition. Click "Install Now".
-To set your Windows Scheduled Task which will automatically open Offline Edition each day for you, follow the instructions here: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308569&FR=1&PA=1&SD=HSCH. (It's basically just a short wizard to create a scheduled task for you)

Other Resources:
Offline Edition how-to guide: To get this guide, go to the Offline Edition download page in salesforce.com, click the "Offline Edition 2.0 tip sheet" link.