Microsoft and Salesforce are expanding their relationship with more integration between the two companies. Salesforce will now add Lightning components to Outlook, bringing full Lightning integration to Microsoft’s Outlook service with a number of feature additions.
The two companies enjoy a close collaboration and over the last two years have worked together on more than 10 product integrations. Microsoft’s recent acquisition of LinkedIn saw the company enter a brief bidding war with Salesforce, bit the amicable race for the enterprise network did nothing to hurt relations.
Introduction of a Lightning add-in for Outlook is:
“Designed to help reduce this pain by giving you the ability to search, view and update all Salesforce CRM entries associated with your email contacts right from Outlook, increasing productivity and helping you save time, so you can focus on the selling. Using Lightning Sync, you can automatically sync contacts and calendar events from your email to your CRM, so you don’t have spend your time manually adding them. Soon you will also be able to add custom sales apps directly into Outlook, creating permanent shortcuts for tasks like updating a price quote using SteelBrick.”
Microsoft says the Lightning component integration is available to Outlook users on the web, Windows, and Mac, while it will also be coming to Outlook mobile soon. In an official blog post announcing Lightning component integration, Microsoft said the collaboration was aimed at making it easier for customers to be more productive:
“Microsoft and Salesforce are committed to bringing joint solutions to help people and organizations achieve more.”
Last year Microsoft and Salesforce renewed their partnership, which has now been running for over two years. In 2016 Salesforce has released a Continuum powered Salesforce1 Windows 10 Mobile app, while the company adopted Outlook for the first time as its email management client of choice.
