Microsoft Teams Salesforce Tie-up: Now You Can Share Customer Data In Teams Chat

Microsoft's new Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) integration lets sales teams share Salesforce data within Microsoft Teams. 

The integration between Salesforce and Microsoft Teams is aimed at making collaboration and meetings between sales staff easier by helping them access and organize customer data in Teams chat, channels and tabs. 

The Salesforce for Teams app is being release as a pilot and can be installed from Microsoft's AppSource website or the Microsoft Teams app store. The integration and app are being offered to Salesforce's Sales and Service Cloud customers with Enterprise or Unlimited edition at no additional cost.

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The app allows joint Teams and Salesforce customers to mention various Salesforce records in Teams channels and chats, such as opportunities, accounts, cases, contacts, and leads. 

It also lets users preview records posted in Teams channels and chats, as well as pin records to Teams channel tabs and chats. Users can edit sales records from within Teams and post conversation moments on the Salesforce Chatter feed of records pinned on Teams channel and chat tabs.  

The Salesforce CRM integration with Teams is very similar to Salesforce's integration with Teams chat rival, Slack. Salesforce released a new Salesforce for Slack app last year, which allowed Salesforce users to search and preview detailed Salesforce records like accounts, cases and opportunities without leaving Slack. It also lets users share records from Salesforce directly to Slack.

In similar fashion, Microsoft-owned GitHub recently launched a GitHub app for Microsoft Teams to match the GitHub app available for Slack. Both help developers and teams work on pull requests and issues over chat and channels.    

In July, Slack filed a complaint against Microsoft in the European Union, claiming Microsoft has "illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force-installing it for millions, blocking its removal and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers".

Salesforce looks at the integration with Teams as one more way to bring its service to the Microsoft communication tools that users are employing, whether it's Microsoft Teams, Outlook or Excel. 

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"With a Salesforce message extension integration, now you can integrate key customer details right inline within a conversation, keeping details right in context and alongside your conversations. Relevant details around customer contact information are displayed within the broader chat stream," Microsoft said in a blogpost. 

"By connecting Salesforce CRM with Microsoft Teams, our joint customers can now benefit from a close connection of the chat and workspace capabilities of Teams alongside key information and actions from Salesforce – which makes team collaboration more focused and effective," said Doug Camplejohn, Salesforce's executive vice president and general manager of Sales Cloud.