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Microsoft Unveils 'Salesforce for Teams' for Integrated CRM and Chat Capabilities
Microsoft on Thursday announced that some Salesforce.com customers can try a "pilot" of Salesforce for Microsoft Teams.
The integration of Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) information with the Teams collaboration solution permits 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. Here's Microsoft's description along those lines:
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. After this, team owners can add the Salesforce application to their team from AppSource or the Microsoft Teams store.
There are some licensing qualifications to use the pilot. 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.
About the Author
Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.