After Dreamforce: How Microsoft Dynamics CRM Stays Ahead of Salesforce on Productivity

When Microsoft announced Dynamics CRM 2016 two weeks ago, the emphasis on productivity enhancements seemed like perhaps little more than an effort to parcel out the buzz on a release that promises a broad range of updates in December.

But with CEO Satya Nadella set to deliver a keynote address at Dreamforce 2015 ten days later to show off Microsoft's latest productivity tools working with Salesforce CRM, the urgency couldn't have been higher to get the Dynamics CRM productivity story out first.

The Microsoft-Salesforce partnership, we learned from last week's Dreamforce event, remains strong. The two firms have committed to ongoing improvements in integrating the Office productivity suite - the same software bundle that for so many years had supposedly set Microsoft's CRM apart from its rivals.

But the Dynamics CRM team's pre-emptive message was clear: we provide more Office productivity more quickly and with better features than our main CRM competitor.

The top line story out of Dreamforce is that Microsoft will continue to work with Salesforce to tie Microsoft productivity tools like Outlook, OneNote, Skype for Business, Delve, and Windows 10 into the Salesforce platform.  And they will improve on previously announced integrations for Power BI, Excel, SharePoint and OneDrive.

Let's piece together how those announcements compares with Microsoft's own productivity enhancement plans for Dynamics CRM.

1. Skype for Business Integration with Salesforce Lightning ExperienceTiming for Salesforce: "A preview is anticipated in the second half of 2016."
   Microsoft has offered Skype integration since at least CRM 2013 for Dynamics CRM, and Skype for Business (previously Lync) integration is also available already for use in click-to-call within the user interface.
2. OneNote Integration with Salesforce Lightning Experience:Timing for Salesforce: "A preview is anticipated in the second half of 2016."
   Microsoft introduced OneNote integration for Dynamics CRM earlier in 2015. And while the productivity enhancements expected in CRM 2016 don't specifically include OneNote, Microsoft has made it clear that the Office and CRM teams will be moving together on product advances together. As Microsoft's director of CRM product marketing Angela Bandlow, told us earlier in 2015, sales productivity will be shaped by both the CRM and Office teams going forward.
   "We give [the Office team] that feedback on how to evolve their tools. There is great collaboration between teams," she told MSDynamicsWorld.com in early September.
3. Salesforce Integration with Office Graph and Office DelveTiming for Salesforce: "Availability is anticipated in the second half of 2016."
   Dynamics CRM will roll out its Office Graph and Delve integration in late 2015, per the team's guidance on the CRM 2016 release.

Living with Salesforce

Remember when the Salesforce partnership news broke? It got off to an ugly start - if you were a Dynamics loyalist. Many in the Dynamics CRM channel saw it as a betrayal, and not without reason. The original messaging from CEO's Satya Nadella and Marc Benioff included some not-so-subtle digs against Microsoft's own CRM, and the news was delivered by Microsoft with seemingly little thought on how Dynamics CRM would hold up on the other side.

Credit Nadella's leadership and consistency of message in the last 16 months with reducing the discontented - at least to some extent. The move was displeasing to many, but it was also part of a strategic direction for Microsoft that most now understand is focused on a lot more than CRM.

But the one remaining concern in the Dynamics space is the question of Microsoft's commitment to making CRM, AX, GP, and NAV the showpiece business applications for Azure, Office 365, and Power BI, among others.  So far, Microsoft executives are saying exactly the right things to users, partners, and Wall Street about where Dynamics stands in the product lineup.

What's Next?

While it is clear that Microsoft is now committed to putting its productivity tools in the hands of as many business users as possible, the Dynamics CRM team also appears to be trying to create a gap between itself and third parties in terms of leveraging products from other Microsoft groups.  As Dynamics managers make a point of saying these days, the level of collaboration between themselves and coworkers on teams like Office, Outlook, Power BI, and Azure are at an all-time high. 

What will it take for Dynamics products to maintain a gap where they have one, or build one in areas where they still trail? Some clues come from the Dynamics ERP and CRM approach to the cloud, where they appear to be trying to accelerate the launch of features and technology asset, with on-premise delivery offered months later - or sometimes not at all. For example, according to the Dynamics CRM 2016 Release Preview Guide, CRM Online will introduce at least two improvements that CRM 2016 on-premise customers won't get for a while:

• Next generation search - This enhanced search experience provides a single list of results across entities, sorted by relevance to the search text, matched to any word across any search enabled field in any search enabled entity. The existing multi-entity Quick Find experience, which we're now call Categorized Search, available in the UI.
• Azure Machine Learning - CRM 2016 will introduce machine Learning "ML" scenario based integration with Azure ML for product cross-sell recommendations and suggested knowledge articles with text analytics.

The next major release of Dynamics AX, AX 7, will go live in Azure first, with an on-premise release to follow. And all customers will be dependent on Azure to an extent via the deployment tools of Lifecycle Services (LCS), a platform that has recently been expanded to Dynamics CRM.

Finally, Power BI access beyond the pre-built connectors for Dynamics CRM and Dynamics Marketing could become an urgent area of improvement. Salesforce has its own BI toolset in the Wave Analytics platform, with a much stronger focus on customer-centric scenarios than Power BI can offer. As Power BI momentum grows, Salesforce could continue to demand a great Microsoft BI story, but Wave also gives the company a potential point of departure and differentiation that could pressure the Dynamics CRM team to quickly up its BI game. Dynamics CRM has a long way to go in making Power BI relevant to many of its customers. CRM custom entities and fields, label mapping, date dimensions, and other factors not covered by the existing connector still leave a lot of work for someone - the customer, the partner, or perhaps an ISV - to do before building out a reporting solution that delivers real business insight.

So while the backlash against rubbing shoulders - and taking selfies - with Salesforce may have faded, both the Dynamics CRM team and its channel partners will have to maintain a careful watch on how well Microsoft charts its course on products and partnerships. It's a huge challenge, but one with few alternatives for the new Microsoft. 

**Taken from MS Dynamics World written by Jason Gumpert