Accelerating Your Business with the Microsoft-LinkedIn Integration
In June 2016, Microsoft announced the acquisition of the world's largest business networking platform, LinkedIn, for a record breaking price tag of $26.2 billion. Since then, both the LinkedIn platform and Microsoft Business Productivity Suite have shown signs of joint evolution. However, in September of this year at Microsoft's annual user conference Inspire, CEO Satya Nadella announced the first major step in merging the data graphs from the two companies with an integration of:
- The world's most popular suite of business productivity tools, Office 365
- A powerful unified platform for customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERM), Dynamics 365
- The largest social selling tool, Sales Navigator.
The data sharing and distribution now possible between these powerful technologies gives today's businesses who take advantage of it, a unique opportunity to accelerate growth and productivity like never before. In this article we'll explain the significance of this announcement and how you can leverage all three of these solutions to gain unprecedented insight and efficiency within your organization.
Office 365 and Dynamics 365
Office 365 is a business productivity and collaboration tool. It organizes users who work from within an enterprise and enables them to easily connect to circles both inside and outside of the organization and be more productive. Popular Office 365 applications such as Excel, PowerPoint and Word are now common place for most organizations and as cloud-first, mobile-first modernization and AI assisted functionality grows, these resources will only continue to amplify communication and collaboration abilities across the value and supply chains. Each Office 365 user has a loosely structured data profile that is associated with their skills, background, personality, behavioral preferences and connections to other users. Entities served through O365 include: users, projects, teams, sessions, calls, messages, conversation threads, queues, projects, documents, knowledge base, and portals.
Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement (CRM) is a business transaction and customer relationship management system. It is of course also about increasing productivity however, the focus for this tool is on disciplined and ordered business cycles that involve users, customers, partners, vendors in revenue acquisition and customer-facing delivery functions. Unlike the loosely structured data in O365, D365 data is highly structured in a relational database management system that emulates a business model to support business processes that generate revenue. Business entities served through D365 include: users, prospect businesses, customers, partners, distributors, leads, competitors, products, opportunities, quotes, sales orders, campaigns, lists, knowledge base, cases, work orders, portals, and delivery projects. Dynamics 365 for financial/operations extends process management to entities such as: invoicing, P&L, HR, cash management, purchasing, inventory, fulfillment and all operational aspects of the business.
