Microsoft, Salesforce Team for Global Partnership

Former rivals Microsoft (MSFT) and Salesforce.com (CRM) extended a mutual olive branch last week, as both companies have entered into a new strategic partnership to create new solutions for their joint customers. The companies said they will work on ways to connect salesforce.com’s customer relationship management (CRM) apps and platform to Microsoft Office and Windows to drive customer productivity.

“We are excited to partner with salesforce.com and help customers thrive in a mobile and cloud-first world,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, in a prepared statement. “Working together we’ll deliver new solutions that connect the customer insights of Salesforce to the cloud productivity of Office 365, the cloud platform of Azure and the mobility of Windows, so our customers can do more.”

Under the terms of the partnership, both companies plan to provide Salesforce1 for Windows and Windows Phone 8.1, allowing customers to access Salesforce and run their business from their mobile devices. A preview program for the integrated program is expected to launch in the fall, with general availability for all users coming sometime in 2015.

Additionally, both companies will work together to provide interoperability between Salesforce and Office 365 so customers can access their sales and service information via the cloud. With Shareforce and Office 365, customers will be able to access, share and collaborate on Office content from within Salesforce and on Salesforce1 using the Office 365 suite of products, with OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online acting as integrated storage options for Salesforce, according to Microsoft. Users will be able to connect their Salesforce data to Excel and Power BI for Office 365 to visualize their data as well. The partnership will also yield the release of the Salesforce App for Outlook, although no release date has been mentioned.

“Today is about putting the customer first,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “Together with Microsoft, we are building bridges that allow customers to be more productive.”