Leslie Anjan's blog

Software-as-a-service CRM giant Salesforce has made its app for Microsoft Teams more broadly available. The Salesforce app for Teams has been available in preview since October. It replicates the Salesforce CRM app for Slack, allowing joint Teams and Salesforce customers to mention various Salesforce records in Teams channels and chats, such as opportunities, accounts, cases, contacts, and leads. Service teams can also improve coordination and response times to open cases to help keep customers happy, reduce the support loads, and cut out productivity barriers caused by switching between Teams and Salesforce. Announcing the general availability of Salesforce for Teams, Microsoft described Salesforce as part of a "new class" of "collaborative apps".  Salesforce and Microsoft compete in CRM – Microsoft Dynamics versus Sales Cloud – and analytics with Tableau and Microsoft PowerBI.  While the Slack purchase opened up a new front of competition between Salesforce and Mi...

Absolute treat for the developers, as Microsoft is integrating AI technologies with its PowerFx low-code programming language. PowerFx, an open-sourced, formula-based tool, is  built on Microsoft Excel . This integration will enable customers to use natural-language input and "programming by example" techniques when developing with PowerApps. Microsoft announced the coming new capabilities during the opening day, May 2021 developers conference. Officials said these new features will be in public preview at the end of June in certain regions. Microsoft is using GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) and the Program Synthesis Using Examples (PROSE) software development kit.  GPT-3 is a natural-language AI model  from  OpenAI, an organization with which Microsoft has been collaborating for a while . The PROSE technology comes from Microsoft Research and is already integrated into Power BI, Excel, and Visual Studio. Officials said the integration of GPT-3 in ...

It was in February 2021 Microsoft Viva was announced. Since it is a new platform and there are so many questions around this technology. I thought this will be an opportunity to let my customers and network know what this really is and go through the key components. Microsoft positions Viva as an Employee Experience Platform. This workplace analytics (Viva) is described as bringing together tools for employee communications, wellbeing, learning and knowledge discovery into one solution. Microsoft Viva is comprises of four modules: Viva Connections  – a combination of company-branded SharePoint portal (aka intranet) in a Teams app with Yammer Communities and stream video integration. Viva Insights  – Personal and Organisational productivity reporting, building on Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics but also pulling insights from third-party platforms like HR applications, Network access, and SAP. Viva Topics  – Using AI (formally kno...