SharePoint Solutions, a vendor of Microsoft (News - Alert) SharePoint products and consulting, has announced the creation of a product that integrates Microsoft SharePoint and Salesforce.com.


The product is available as extensions to the SharePoint Data Zoom Web Part, a free tool that allows SharePoint users to build content on any page. “Armed with the SharePoint Data Zoom Web Part and the extensions for Salesforce.com (News - Alert) sales objects,” company officials say, “users will be able to pull into SharePoint all Salesforce.com data from leads, opportunities, contacts, accounts and users.” The SharePoint Data Zoom extensions for Salesforce.com cost $4,995 per Web front-end server.

“SharePoint and Salesforce.com are the two biggest business software successes of the past five years,” says Jeff Cate, president of SharePoint Solutions, adding that Microsoft represents the traditional software company in which users purchase licenses for software that is installed on computers, whereas Salesforce.com represents “the new breed of software companies that provides software via the Internet on a subscription basis. From the customer’s perspective, Microsoft’s SharePoint is the best portal and team collaboration software available, and Salesforce.com makes the best Customer Relationship Management and Sales Force Automation software.”

 

Other synergies abound: Also this week TMC had the news that Microsoft “plans to turn the Groove collaboration software it acquired in 2005 – along with its now-chief software architect Ray Ozzie – into its main application for workers to access content stored on SharePoint servers, even while offline.”

Groove will be renamed SharePoint Workplace and will be released in the first half of next year as part of Office 2010, according to company officials.

“SharePoint Workspace 2010 will enable a whole new set of scenarios that [will] help customers be more productive with Office and SharePoint through a more seamless online/offline experience,” Microsoft officials said, according to Network World (News - Alert) Middle East reporting found on TMC. “SharePoint Workspace will enable users to take SharePoint sites offline and work with the content on people’s desktops whether or not they are connected.” 

 

Linking the overshadowed Groove to the fast-growing SharePoint platform is a good move, says Robert Helm, an analyst with the independent Directions on Microsoft.

 

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