News
Pilot Begins of Microsoft Teams-Salesforce CRM Integration
- By Kurt Mackie
- October 22, 2020
A new Microsoft Teams capability that lets users of the collaboration solution access information from the Salesforce.com customer relationship management (CRM) platform debuted this week.
Select users of both Microsoft and Salesforce can now access a "pilot" of Salesforce for Teams, Microsoft announced on Thursday. Specifically, it's just available to "Microsoft customers licensed with Teams, and Salesforce customers with Sales and Service licenses in Enterprise, or higher editions," per Microsoft's AppSource description.
The integration gives access to customer details within Teams chat conversations. Users will be able to point to Salesforce records within chats. They can pin Salesforce records within Teams as tabs. The integration also lets users modify Salesforce records directly within Teams without having to switch applications.
It's possible to control what Salesforce CRM information will get surfaced in Teams. Administrators can choose "whether details can be shared within a secured team, or whether they require a Salesforce log-in to display," according to Microsoft's announcement.
It's not wholly clear, but the Salesforce for Teams pilot possibly will be available next year. For instance, it's described in a Microsoft AppSource overview page as being part of a "Salesforce Winter '21 pilot."
Organizations wanting to use the pilot will have to contact their Salesforce account executive for initial provisioning. "To get started, Salesforce customers will need to contact their customer success representatives or account executives to have them provision integration capabilities for Microsoft Teams," Microsoft's description said. "After this, team owners can add the Salesforce application to their team from AppSource or the Microsoft Teams store."
About the Author
Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.