Salesforce and Microsoft expand partnership: Office and Skype integrations, Salesforce1 for Windows 10 Mobile

Salesforce and Microsoft — companies that traditionally compete in the customer relationship management software market — today announced a deeper partnership, building on the big one they announced last year. The new partnership will lead to integrations of Microsoft’s Skype for Business, OneNote, Office Delve, and Office Graph software products into Salesforce.

And Salesforce will come out with a Salesforce1 mobile app for Windows 10 in the second half of next year.

Content from Salesforce will become available in Office Graph and Office Delve in that time frame, too.

Salesforce users will be able to make voice and video calls with Skype for Business (formerly Lync) and take notes with OneNote inside the recently unveiled Salesforce Lightning Experience design in preview, also in the second half of next year.

Perhaps the best way to look at this is Microsoft continuing to open up its core software for usage on non-Microsoft platforms. Think back to Office for iPad, Cortana for Android, and most recently Office apps (and perhaps also Cortana) on the Android-based Cyanogen OS.

Of course, the unspoken context here is the rumored Microsoft acquisition of Salesforce that never happened. Microsoft was willing to buy Salesforce for $55 billion, but Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s bold chief executive, had wanted Microsoft to pay as much as $70 billion, as CNBC reported back in May.

Now the companies have put aside any concerns that might have emerged as a result of all the acquisition buzz and are getting a little closer.