CalendarAnything lets you view your business at a high level or get into the details — all on one screen. It’s completely customizable to exactly what your organization needs, whether you’re managing a team of ten or coordinating hundreds.
CalendarAnything is the #1 Salesforce Calendar App because it makes Salesforce complexity easy with a calendar UI that houses it all, including Google, Outlook, Slack, and Zoom meetings. CalendarAnything helps to improve user adoption with customizable Salesforce calendars from any standard, custom, or external object with a date/time field.
Let’s take a look at the latest enhancements to CalendarAnything and how a leading home storage manufacturer is leveraging CalendarAnything to bring flexibility to its dealer network.
Simplifying Salesforce complexity with new CalendarAnything features
CalendarAnything has released many new features and functionalities over the past quarter, including:
- Bi-directional integration between CalendarAnything and Slack lets users send Slack messages to colleagues or public Slack channels directly from CalendarAnything
- Added support for Salesforce Notes allows easy collaboration on the fly by storing any notes related to a specific record within a central location
- Ability to expand event details upon hovering over a record
- Two way integration with Microsoft 365, Outlook, and extended Google integration allows users to create web calendars for any of the calendars they are currently subscribed to within Google or Outlook
- Expanded Import/Export functionality means you do not have to rebuild everything you’ve built in a sandbox org within your production org
- Specify additional fields to be viewed or only searched to make any field within the object that you’re working in searchable
- Create recurring records from any Custom or Standard object
- A new mini month navigator saves users a few clicks
- A custom map tab shows maps within the CalendarAnything detailed pop-up.
Lacking a central tool for an extensive dealer network
The Stow Company is a wholesale manufacturer of parts for the home storage industry. It distributes through three distribution channels: retail, direct-to-consumer, and dealers.
Ryan Vannoy, Manager of Dealer Development at The Stow Company, works in the development side of the dealership division to enhance Stow’s product lines, tools, training, and resources.
Stow had different dealers using different tools with no central tool that allowed them to communicate across the network. This practice hindered Stow’s ability to organize the leads generated collectively through its website and ultimately drive them to each dealer location.
Stow needed a solution that would work across multiple dealer locations and environments with project management and marketing automation capabilities. It also needed to integrate with the proprietary software tool used to design, quote, and sell projects to customers. And lastly, it was essential for Stow to have a fully integrated calendaring system for its CRM.
Discovering a solution but with limitations
Stow explored a few different CRMs and landed on Salesforce Experience Cloud. Experience Cloud met all of Stow’s CRM needs except for its standard Salesforce calendar.
“Shortly after launching, we realized we had a bit of an uphill battle with the standard Salesforce calendar. We had basic UI challenges, limited flexibility in the different views, and the list of challenges went on and on,” said Vannoy.
Stow needed the ability to create and view different calendars for design and installation appointments and a better way to view calendars via the mobile app. The company also needed to be able to continue to work from the standard Salesforce event object since Stow had already built marketing automations that were triggered from the object.
Vannoy began a search for a new calendar solution that Stow could customize to its needs. He looked at Salesforce Maps, which was robust for transportation mapping but needed more for calendaring. Stow considered developing a custom-built scheduling app that would reside in Experience Cloud, but that would have required continuing to use the existing Experience Cloud calendar UI.
Implementing CalendarAnything to great success
Stow found CalendarAnything on the Salesforce AppExchange and began exploring it as a potential solution because it did not have the limitations of the Experience Cloud calendar. CalendarAnything created a proof of concept that Stow successfully demoed with a few select dealerships. Stow launched CalendarAnything across its dealer division in February 2023.
“We chose CalendarAnything because it had the right blend of simplicity, flexibility, and sophistication. It gave us the ability to launch to a network of over 50 locations with hundreds of users, knowing that each has its own processes, preferences, and way of doing things. We’re getting more and more positive feedback from our users,” said Vannoy.
The unique CalendarAnything features that Stow uses include:
- The standard Salesforce event object, which saves Stow the time and effort of having to reinvent its pre-built automations
- The ability to see several different views, such as the Gantt view, as well as the traditional calendar views
- A user-friendly interface that is simple to toggle calendars on and off
- Different display options when hovering over an event
- The ability to change from auto to fixed cell height
- The search feature to see live results within just a couple of keystrokes
- Syncing with Google and Microsoft Outlook for dealers that still rely on those systems
CalendarAnything has allowed each user to establish how they want to use the calendar, unlike Experience Cloud, which limited user adjustments. Stow likes the CalendarAnything individual user settings, such as the ability to show weekends or modify the time the day starts and create custom calendars instead of using default calendars.
“The reason we landed on CalendarAnything and why it has been successful in getting adoption is it checked off all the things that we couldn’t do with the previous calendar,” said Vannoy. “Having our network able to transition to using CalendarAnything helps them be more successful in the future because it streamlines and simplifies all aspects of their business because they’re not bouncing from tool to tool to tool.”
Silverline helps clients like The Stow Company deploy, manage, and enable continuous value with Salesforce’s portfolio of products with tailored digital transformation solutions to meet your current and future needs. Learn how CalendarAnything can help your Salesforce journey by watching the Salesforce Complexity Made Easy with CalendarAnything webinar.
