Today at Salesforce Dreamforce in San Francisco, Microsoft and Salesforce joint announced future integrations between their two business collaboration platforms. While today integration is already available between Outlook and Salesforce, future integrations planned for preview in the second half of 2016 will include:
- Skype for Business, providing presence awareness inside Salesforce and allow for seamless web conferencing, chat and VOIP calls
- OneNote, enabling note taking to be linked directly to Salesforce records
- Office Graph and Office Delve, so surface Salesforce content inside Microsoft’s new search and discovery UIs
- Salesforce1 Mobile App for Windows 10
At first glance, these two companies have several competing products. However, this move showcases that both companies understand they have a large number of overlapping customers, and providing a seamless productivity and business process experience is a winning situation for everyone.
Salesforce Gains Productivity and Collaboration
As I wrote last year, the Salesforce platform has been missing a few basic collaboration features, such as:
"No integrated web-conferencing or video chat - Chatter does provide integrated instant messaging based on Salesforce.com’s 2011 acquisition of DimDim, but the company still has not delivered native web-conferencing features. “
Today’s announcement of Skype integration will help fill that gap. The ability to seamlessly start web-conferences, chats or VOIP calls from within Salesforce will be a very welcome addition. Ideally the content from those events will also be saved back to the appropriate records in Salesforce. For example, a Skype chat conversation about an account should be saved back to the Chatter stream for that record, or the recording of a web-conference about a service record should be accessible in the future to help resolve similar incidents.
"No long form content creation - While Chatter does allow for posts in the activity stream, it currently lacks any formal document creation tools. The lack of an integrated document editor means people have to switch to another tool (blog, wiki or word processor), changing contexts to create content. In 2012 Salesforce.com acquired online collaborative editor Stypi, but the closest thing we've seen to that is the very simple Notes application avilable in the mobile client of Salesforce1.”
Today’s announcement of OneNote integration may help this, but they also offer some integration between Salesforce Files and the Microsoft Office Apps. The big benefit here is that information collected in OneNote will be able to link directly back to Salesforce records. Salesforce already has there own basic note taking application (which includes basic task management) so it will be interesting to see which application teams choose to use. Ideally it will be only one or the other, as you don’t want information spread across multiple tools.
Microsoft Embraces Winning Platforms
These announcements are great examples of “the new Microsoft”, where under Satya Nadella the company has embraced the idea of not going at it alone, but instead becoming comfortable with integrating with other successful vendors. (ex: Releasing Office applications for iPad and iPhones, instead of just their own Windows powered devices.) Even though Microsoft has competing products to Salesforce: Yammer vs Chatter, Dynamics vs Sales Cloud, OneNote vs Salesforce Tasks/Notes, OneDrive vs Salesforce Files, etc. they understand that many of their customers use products from both vendors. While there may be integration challenges for IT (well know more next year about directory integration, identity, security, compliance, etc), the people using Salesforce business solutions (Sales, Marketing, Service) to get their daily jobs done will surely benefit from a more seamless with their Microsoft collaboration tools.
Perhaps the most signifigant news is the Office Graph/Delve integration. When Microsoft first introduced Delve, the premise was that people would be able to easily discover relevant content across a variety of tools. Today’s announcement solidifies that claim, highlights that Office Graph extends beyond just Microsoft products, and shows how Delve can surface content from other key business platforms. Now people will be able to easily see all the files, emails, and Salesforce records about a customer or service record in one place.
The Big Winner Is Joint Customers
Microsoft and Salesforce both have very positive momentum right now with their product portfolios and marketing messages. With Office 365 Microsoft is successfully shedding the “SharePoint is just a corporate intranet” image that existed during the 2000s, and Salesforce is moving far beyond just being a CRM tool used by Sales people. Bringing together these two successful platforms should provide a very compelling experience for joint customers, reducing the need for people to switch back and forth between the two. However, with the extensibility of these two cloud-centric platforms, I’m disappointed to hear the integrations will take almost a year to be delivered. Overall we’re very optimistic about today’s news, and Constellation Research will continue to monitor these developments and report on the progress.
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