Microsoft and Salesforce are putting aside their historic rivalry in order to make it easier for businesses to use their products. It may be the latest fresh breeze blowing out of Redmond since new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took the helm earlier this year.
See also: Microsoft’s New CEO Wants To Look Beyond Its Past To Find Its Future
On Thursday, the companies announced they’ve entered a partnership to bring Salesforce’s software for sales teams—technically called customer relationship management (CRM) applications—to Microsoft Office, Windows and Windows Phone devices.
Salesforce1 for Windows and Windows Phone 8.1 will give business owners more flexibility on mobile and is slated to be available to the general public in 2015—signaling that this isn’t a short-term partnership. Salesforce for Office 365 will let users collaborate on Office from within Salesforce as well as use OneDrive for Business and SharePoint online as storage options, though its unclear when this will be available.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Though even détente only goes so far—Salesforce employees are still banned from Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference.
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