Inspire 2021: Microsoft announces Dynamics 365 Teams integration, new collaborative apps

With a growing user base of 145 million daily active users, Microsoft Teams is a big topic at the company’s annual Inspire partner conference that just kicked off this morning. Teams has slowly but surely become a versatile platform where users can access many Microsoft 365 services as well as third-party apps, and Microsoft announced this morning a new Dynamics 365 integration in Teams that will let users view and edit Dynamics 365 data within Teams at no extra cost.

With Dynamics 365 data access now included with Microsoft Teams, employees will be able to view and edit Dynamics records right within their Teams workflow, with automated notifications when other employees when they make key changes on records. Dynamics 365 users will also be able to add a Teams meeting when creating an appointment, and also capture notes during a Teams call that will be automatically be saved in the Dynamics 365 record.

In addition to this new Dynamics 365 integration, Microsoft Teams is also welcoming new collaborative apps from partners including Atlassian Confluence, SAP C4C, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday. Later this summer, Microsoft Teams will also ISV partners to sell their apps directly within Teams, and benefit from Microsoft’s new commercial marketplace fees that have just been reduced from the standard 20% industry fee to 3%.

Lastly, Microsoft Viva, the company’s new employee experience platform within Teams will also add 21 new partner integrations later this year. Workday, Qualtrics, and ServiceNow will follow the existing partnerships with Headspace, SuccessFactors, and other apps that bring together various tools for employee engagement, learning, and wellbeing.