News

Microsoft, Salesforce Announce New Integrated Offerings

• By Gladys Rama
• September 17, 2015

• Related: Microsoft Extends Partnership with Salesforce to Cloud-Based IoT

Sometime rivals Microsoft and Salesforce.com this week shared their latest plans to integrate their various enterprise productivity offerings.

The two companies, which compete against each other in the CRM space, entered into a partnership in mid-2014 that was aimed at integrating Microsoft's Office 365 and Windows products with Salesforce.com's core CRM offering.

Since then, the companies have unveiled several integrated solutions, including a Salesforce.com app for Microsoft Outlook that was released as a preview this past March.

On Wednesday at the Salesforce.com Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, the two companies gave an update of their integration plans. That Outlook app, which works with Office 365 and Outlook 2013, is now generally available. Also available is the Salesforce1 Mobile App for Office.

Expected to become generally available sometime in the second half of next year are a Salesforce1 mobile app for Windows 10, and integration between Salesforce.com and Microsoft's enterprise search and collaboration solutions, Office Graph and Office Delve.

The two companies also said they plan to integrate Salesforce.com's revamped user interface, dubbed "Lightning Experience," with Microsoft's Skype for Business and OneNote products. Integration among these products will be available in preview form in the second half of 2016.

"As a platform and productivity company, we are focused on bringing together the best of Microsoft Azure, Office and Windows with partners like Salesforce to empower our mutual customers to network, collaborate, communicate and discover information in more effective ways," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a prepared statement.