Configuring Email and Calendar Sync in Groove

With Groove's server side (background) email and calendar sync, all of your reps activity is logged back to Salesforce, no matter where they're sending emails or creating events from. That means reps can send and receive emails from their cell phone and still have everything automatically logged back to Salesforce.

We highly recommend you enable our background email and calendar sync and in this guide we'll walk through configuring it.

How To Configure Email and Calendar Sync Settings

To access the settings in this article, you must be a Salesforce and Groove Admin.

The majority of the email and calendar sync settings can be configured from within Manage My Org > Profile Settings. 

Some of the more advanced settings that apply to specific customer use cases are not shown within Groove Manage My Org and can only be found in Salesforce’s Custom Settings. Those settings are denoted with an asterisk (*) after the setting’s name. You can access these settings in Salesforce through the following steps: 

1. Open Setup 
2. In the Quick Find Box, search "Custom Settings" | Click into Custom Settings
3. Click Manage to the left of "Groove Settings" 
4. Press Edit to modify your team's "Organization Wide Default" Profile Settings, or scroll to the bottom of the page and press Edit to the left of the Profile Settings group you want to modify

How sync works

When Groove syncs emails/calendar events from Google to Salesforce it tries to find related Leads, Contacts and Users in Salesforce by looking at the recipient's or invitee's email address(es).

Enabling Email and Calendar Sync for End Users

In order for end users to be able to use Groove’s background email and calendar sync, the settings Allow Background Email Sync and Allow Background Calendar Sync must be enabled.  

These settings only control whether or not users will be able to activate the background email and background calendar sync settings in their individual accounts.  If these settings are disabled, then end-users will receive an error message and a tool tip if they attempt to enable the background email sync and background calendar sync settings in their individual accounts.

• Error Message: Sync connection error! Contact your admin!
• Tool Tip: Email/Calendar sync has been disabled for your account, please contact your admin or Groove support to learn more. 

Note: With these settings disabled, users can still manually log emails and events back to Salesforce.  Users would only be restricted from using Groove’s automatic background sync for their activity logging. 

Controlling How Email and Event Records Are Synced to Salesforce 

By default, Groove will sync emails and events to the relevant Lead/Contact using the recipient email address. Groove can also sync emails and events to Opportunities and Cases. The Related-to Lookup Logic setting enables you to customize how emails and events sync according to your business process by choosing one of the following options.

• No Related-to search – Groove will only sync emails and events to the relevant Contacts and/or Leads.

• My open Opportunities – Groove will try to find the related Opportunity among all the open Opportunities that were created by the syncing user.

• My open Opportunities* – Find the related Opportunity among all my open Opportunities (Restricted*)

• Any of my Opportunities – Find the related Opportunity among all my opportunities

• Any of my Opportunities* – Find the related Opportunity among all my opportunities (Restricted*)

• Any open Opportunity – Find the related Opportunity among all open Opportunities

• Any of my Opportunities – Find the related Opportunity among all open Opportunities (Restricted*)

• Any Opportunity – Find the related Opportunity among all Opportunities

• Any Opportunity* – Find the related Opportunity among all Opportunities (Restricted*)

• Any of my open Cases – Find the related Case among my open Cases

• My Cases – Find the related Case among my Cases

• Any open Cases – Find the related Case among all open Cases

• Any Cases – Find the related Case among all Cases

• Custom Object Logging – Find the related record via my org’s Custom Object Logging query, which can be configured through these steps

"Restricted" means that Groove will only find opportunities directly associated with a contact via an opportunity contact role. Otherwise, Groove will only extend the search by looking at opportunities that exist under the contact's account.

Ensuring Internal Emails Don't Get Synced

The Email Domain Blocklist setting allows you to specify a list of email domains that are "blocklisted". By default, this setting only supports the blocklisting of email domains (e.g., @clari.com), not entire email addresses (e.g., test@clari.com). 

Below is the expected behavior for activities where the email recipient or event invitee domains are blocklisted:

1. When Groove logs or syncs emails from Google to Salesforce and tries to find related Salesforce records based on the recipient's or the sender's emails address, Groove will first remove all email addresses that belong to any of the blocklisted domains. This means, no emails will be logged under contacts or leads that are "blocklisted".

2. When Groove logs or syncs events from Google to Salesforce and tries to find related Salesforce records based on the invitees' emails addresses, Groove will first remove all email addresses that belong to any of the blocklisted domains. This means, logged and synced events will not be related to any contacts or leads that are "blocklisted" as of their email address.

3. If the option Blocklist Applies to Email Open Tracking is activated and all of the recipients of an outbound email are blocklisted, email open tracking is deactivated for the outbound email. Therefore email opens will not be monitored by Groove for this particular email.

    

You must comma separate the list of domains in this field.

Enhanced Email Domain Blocklist*

Note: This setting can only be enabled from within Salesforce’s Custom Settings. This setting is only available in Groove Managed Package versions 9.179 or greater.  Please reach out to your CSM or the Clari Support team if you would like a Managed Package upgrade. 

The New Domain Blocklist Enabled setting enhances the standard Email Domain Blocklist setting (please see above) with some additional features. When this setting is enabled, admins can add the following to the standard Email Domain Blocklist setting:

• Any number of email addresses 
• Wildcards (e.g., *clari.com or *clari.*)
• Full email addresses (e.g., example123@clari.com)

Best Match Email Logging

The option Best Match Email Logging controls whether Groove logs the email (if enabled) only under the Contacts + Opportunity/Case pair with the highest score, or (if disabled) under every found Contacts + Opportunity/Case pair.

Enabling this setting will lead to less email (i.e., Task) records being created in Salesforce and possibly more accurate activity reporting. Deactivating this option will lead to a more comprehensive activity history under all possible records but more email (i.e., Task) records will be created.

Note: If shared activities are not activated in your Salesforce org, this option is disregarded and Groove will log and sync emails under every found Contacts + Opportunity/Case pair. Thus, we recommend enabling shared activities.

Log Bounced Emails to Salesforce

It’s very frustrating when reps get those pesky “Message delivery failed” prompts letting them know they sent an email to a bad email address. Now you and your team can keep track of which emails bounced back by having them logged to Salesforce in real time! 

This is an optional setting. If you’d like us to enable “Log Bounced Emails,” please contact your CSM!
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Choosing which events are synced

Enable the Only Sync CRM Related Events setting if you only want calendar events that are related to a Salesforce Contact/Lead to be logged to Salesforce. When this setting is disabled, all calendar events will be logged to Salesforce, regardless of whether they have Salesforce Contacts/Leads as invitees.

The Only Sync CRM Related Events setting interacts with the Email Domain Blocklist setting to determine whether a calendar event will be logged to Salesforce or not.  The table below outlines how calendar events would be expected to log based on whether the invitees are blocklisted, and whether the Only Sync CRM Related Events setting is enabled.

Add only Groove Users as Invitees

Note: This setting can only be enabled from within Salesforce’s Custom Settings.  

When Groove logs or syncs a calendar event from Google/Microsoft to Salesforce, it analyzes the list of invitees in order to find which Leads, Contacts and Users should be added to the Event in Salesforce.

The Add Only Groove Users As Invitees setting controls what happens if one of the found Salesforce Users doesn't have a Groove license assigned to them. If this option is enabled, all Users that don't have a Groove license assigned to them won't be added to the list of invitees on the Salesforce Event record. Otherwise, all found Users will be added.

Mirroring events created in SFDC to GCAL*

Note: This setting is only available for G-Suite customers. 

In order to have all Events created in SFDC synced back to Google Calendar, you can follow the process below, which includes one setting from Groove and one from Salesforce.

From Salesforce:

1. Open Setup
2. In the Quick Find Box, search "Remote Site Settings" | Select Remote Site Settings
3. Click the button New Remote Site
4. Populate the fields as follows then press Save:

• Remote Site Name: app_grooveapp_com
• Remote Site URL: https://app.grooveapp.com
• Disable Protocol Security: Unchecked
• Description: Groove webservices
• Active: Checked 

If you'd like your users to have the option to only sync certain events back to Google Calendar, you can leave 'Always Mirror Events in Google Calendar' disabled in Groove, and add the field  Mirror in Owner's Calendar  (API Name: DaScoopComposer__Mirror_in_Owner_s_Calendar__c) to the event page layout in Salesforce.

Support for Multiple Emails on Leads/contacts

By default, only the standard email field on the Lead, Contact and User object are considered when Groove syncs an email/event to SFDC. 

In order to consider support for more than one email, Groove added a field Email 2 to the Contact and to the Lead object (API names Contact.DaScoopComposer__Email_2__c  and Lead.DaScoopComposer__Email_2__c, respectively). Note that, as these fields were added by Groove, they may need to be added to the Contact and Lead page layouts in Salesforce.  

The Alternative Email Matching setting controls whether you want Groove to consider the field Email 2 when trying to find related Leads or Contacts. The lookup logic uses the OR operator (i.e., the email address is found in the standard Email field OR the Email 2 field).

If you have already added an alternative email field and wish this field to be considered by Groove, you should set up a Salesforce workflow/field update that populates Groove's Email 2 field with the value of your alternative email field. For all existing records, you should also retroactively copy the value of your alternative email field to Groove's Email 2 field. Salesforce has various different methods for mass updating records, and you can find the details of those here.

​Warning: Enabling Alternative Email Matching will have performance implications if you have more than 300,000 Lead or Contact records in your Salesforce instance. We do not recommend to activate Alternative Email Matching if you have more than 500,000 Lead or Contact records in your Salesforce instance.

Unresolved Items

When Groove logs or syncs emails, it tries to find related Leads and Contacts by matching the email address of the sender or the recipients with Salesforce records.

The Create Unresolved Items setting allows you to control what happens if no related record is found. When this setting is disabled, Groove will disregard the email. When this setting is enabled, Groove will create an unresolved item. 

What emails are logged as Unresolved Items depends on a combination of your team’s Email Domain Blocklist setting and your team’s Create Unresolved Items setting.  The table below outlines how emails would be expected to log based on whether the recipients are blocklisted, and whether the Create Unresolved Items setting is enabled.

Note: Groove will create a different type of "unresolved item" than what Salesforce calls an "unresolved item". Groove will still create an actual Task record but the Name and Related To fields will be blank on that record. Thus, the Task record will not be added to any record's Activity History. Users can view all their "Groove Unresolved Items" in a dedicated Visualforce page.

Support for Email Aliases

Note: This is only relevant if a user is sending and/or receiving emails from an email address that's different from the their email address in Salesforce.

When Groove's background sync tries to log an email/event into Salesforce, the user the activity is Assigned To gets determined by the following logic:

1. First, Groove scans all senders/recipients on the email and tries to find a matching user in Salesforce with that email address. If a matching user is found as the sender/recipient, the email will be assigned to them.

2. If Groove cannot find a user in Salesforce with a matching email address in Step 1, it will then assign the activity to whoever's Groove account is logging the email.

    

If a users email address in SFDC does not match the email address they are sending/receiving emails from, we recommend you configure the following fields on their user record in SFDC. (Note that, as these fields were added by Groove, they may need to be added to the User page layout in Salesforce). 

• Email Alias 1 (API Name: DaScoopComposer__Email_Alias_1__c)

• Email Alias 2 (API Name: DaScoopComposer__Email_Alias_2__c)

   

Once these fields are configured, Groove will also take them into consideration when determining who to assign the activity to.

Activity Type and Subtype

For emails, Groove will always log Tasks with the value "Email" in the Type field.

For calendar events, Groove use whatever value is selected as your team's Event Type default in Salesforce. You can review and modify your team's current Event Type picklist value default through the following steps in Salesforce:

1. Open Setup
2. Navigate to Object Manager
3. Select the Event object
4. Click into Fields & Relationships
5. Click into the Type field

The Task Subtype field will always have a value of “Email”.  The Event Subtype field will always have a value of “Event”.  

Calendar Sync Limitations

1. Google events that last longer than 14 days cannot be synced to Salesforce. This is a Salesforce limitation of the event object.

2. After a Google event was synced to Salesforce, any updates on the Salesforce event within the next 30 seconds are not synced back from Google to Salesforce.

3. If a Google event is created where the time zone of the start-time and end-time are not equal (rare), the event in Salesforce will have set the start-date and and end-date in the same timezone.

4. Note that recurring events in Salesforce have several limitations that affect how Groove is able to sync recurring events: 

• A recurring event that lasts longer than 1 day will be converted to a 1 day event when synced from Google to Salesforce.

• In Salesforce the number of instances of a recurring series is limited (Daily: 100; Weekly: 53; Monthly: 60; Yearly: 10). 

• When an event is synced from Google to Salesforce and the end date of the recurring series is beyond that limit, Groove will set the end date of the recurring series respectively in Salesforce. 

• Only the calendar owner of the event in GCal can sync the recurring event back to SFDC. This is because SFDC requires that all child events be know at the time of logging and GCal only surfaces this information to the owner of recurring events.

Now all of your users data will be synced to Salesforce correctly!