News

Microsoft, Workday Partner on Office 365 Integration

• By Gladys Rama
• September 27, 2016

Microsoft this week added Workday to its list of strategic partnerships aimed at bolstering its cloud productivity suite.

As part of a deal announced Tuesday, Microsoft and Workday said they are taking steps to integrate the former's Office 365 suite with the latter's cloud-based HR and finance software. The general goal, according to the companies, is to streamline the way their mutual customers work across both of their applications through data analytics and business intelligence.

"We will simplify daily tasks and actions across business processes and empower teams to better collaborate," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a video message about the announcement. "But the impact of this work goes even further, to infuse more intelligence into customers' organizations. Every company in every industry holds a wealth of information in the form of organizational data. Connecting Office 365 to Workday will provide customers with new knowledge and insights to understand how and when and with whom they're spending their time, and take action converting data into intelligence."

Organizations can expect to see the first capabilities stemming from the partnership in the second quarter of 2017, the companies said. These capabilities will include:

• The ability to indicate organizational changes in Workday that are then automatically reflected in Office 365 Groups. For instance, if an employee is transfered to a different team, Office 365 will automatically adjust the appropriate group's e-mail lists and calendars. This capability will be powered by the Microsoft Graph, which keeps track of organizations' various business data, including calendars, contacts and shared files.
  
  
• Integration between Workday's Human Capital Management product and Microsoft Graph to give insight into employees' collaboration and communication habits. This capability will use Microsoft's MyAnalytics solution (previously called Delve Analytics), which lets users keep track of how they spend their time.
  
  
• Support for Workday in Flow, which is Microsoft's workflow automation solution that is currently in preview.

Workday, which claims a customer base of over 1,100 organizations, is the latest cloud-centric productivity company to be courted by Microsoft in an effort to boost its own solutions. Microsoft also partners with sometime-rivals Salesforce.com, Box and Dropbox on a number of areas related to its Office and Office 365 products. Workday itself competes with Microsoft's Dynamics ERP line.