Salesforce Customers Benefit from Microsoft Partnership

A partnership between Microsoft and Salesforce promises to improve integration between Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) product and Microsoft reporting, file sharing, and other products and services. The partnership should benefit customers who use both Salesforce and Microsoft products by resolving a number of shortfalls in the Salesforce offering. For Microsoft, the partnership promotes Office sales and turns the world’s largest CRM vendor into an Azure customer. However, the deal also weakens the competitive advantages of Microsoft’s own Dynamics CRM, a substantial competitor to Salesforce.

Data Analysis and File Sharing

The partnership has developed or is planning several technologies for data access, analysis, reporting, and sharing of data between the Salesforce service and Microsoft reporting and collaboration tools. These in turn can help organizations integrate Salesforce data into their own business processes and systems.

Reporting and data analysis. The partnership has released an update to Power Query for Excel that provides access to Salesforce data and reports in Excel to perform analysis and create reports. Power Query for Excel enables expert users to extract, transform, and load data from databases and other sources for self-service data analysis. This could be a valuable option for Excel-savvy end users to customize built-in Salesforce reports or create new reports for their own business practices (such as sales incentive systems). Reporting has been a weak spot of Salesforce in the past and has led customers to deploy third-party solutions or custom code. The Salesforce Power Query feature offers two access points for Salesforce data: Salesforce Reports and Salesforce Objects. With Salesforce Reports, users can access the transformed data that Salesforce uses to deliver its standard reports to build charts and other kinds of data presentations in Excel. With Salesforce Objects, skilled users can go beyond the data in standard Salesforce reports and query data from the underlying table objects in the Salesforce database.