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- Not Just a Contact Database
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These optional components give you more power to connect and engage your supporters.
civiCASE
Case management for clients and constituents.
civiCONTRIBUTE
Online fundraising and donor management.
civiEVENT
Online event registration and participant tracking.
civiMEMBER
Online signup and membership management.
civiMAIL
Personalized email blasts and newsletters.
civiREPORT
Report generation and template management.
Google Apps integration
I looked through the API documentation for Google Apps at http://code.google.com/apis/apps/gdata_provisioning_api_v2.0_reference.html
and think there are 3 main areas that CiviCRM could integrate with.
First, CiviEvent could use the Google Calendar Data API to create new events, edit or delete existing events, query for events that match particular criteria, publicize upcoming events by programmatically adding them to Google Calendar.
Second, the CiviCRM functionality for managing groups of contacts could be extended to create/maintain email distribution lists within Google Apps. I'm not sure how much overlap there would be with CiviMail. But CiviMail doesn't work well for folks on a shared webhost. Google provides PHP APIs for all CRUD operations related to email distribution lists.
Third, there is a "Google Spreadsheets Data API" that allows a program to do all CRUD operations on Google spreadsheets. This may be a way to create "pretty" reports out of CiviCRM without requiring Java on the server, which is now the case for CiviReports.