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Microsoft announced some significant integrations between LinkedIn, the professional social network it bought last year for over $26 billion<\/a> and Microsoft Dynamics 365, the company\u2019s CRM and ERP suite.<\/p>\n It was clear that when Microsoft paid that much money for LinkedIn, it had plans to use that data in other Microsoft products. Those ideas began to emerge last summer<\/a> with some Office 365 integration announcements, but now we are starting to see some direct links (if you\u2019ll pardon the expression) to try and leverage LinkedIn as a kind of lead generation and recruitment engine for Microsoft\u2019s enterprise products.<\/p>\n The announcement includes two major pieces. First of all, the company is linking Dynamics 365 and the LinkedIn Sales Navigator tool<\/a> to give sales people access to its database of 500 million users<\/a>.<\/p>\n Microsoft is also announcing a tool for HR pros called Dynamics 365 for Talent, which gives Dynamics 365 ERP users, the ability to search for new talent directly from LinkedIn\u2019s Recruiter and Learning solutions, and manage employees from recruitment throughout their time with company.<\/p>\n Microsoft\u2019s Scott Guthrie, executive vice president for the Cloud and Enterprise Group at Microsoft points out in a blog post announcing the new integrations<\/a> that there are already connections between Dynamics 365 and Office 365 products. The next logical step it would seem would be to build similar connections to LinkedIn, especially for sales. \u201cSales Navigator with Dynamics 365 will dramatically increase the effectiveness of salespeople by tapping into their professional networks and relationships, giving them the ability to improve their pipeline\u2026,\u201d Guthrie wrote.<\/p>\n Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research says this opens the door to social selling where you can track connections between people at your company and the target company. He offers an example to illustrate the concept:<\/p>\n \u201cHow do you find out who knows whom inside a company? Traverse your Office 365 data, your [Dynamics 365] CRM database and your LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and you realize Joe and Abdul have known each other since university days. Let\u2019s put Abdul on the sales call,\u201d Wang explained.<\/p>\n He says this solves a long-known problem where companies were trying to kludge\u00a0together solutions to make these different technologies work together. Now, Microsoft is doing it for them.<\/p>\n \u201cMicrosoft has been focused on integrating its acquisitions and the LinkedIn to Dynamics 365 [to] Office 365 is the latest [iteration]. Customers already use these three products in disparate fashion spending time doing arm chair integration. What they\u2019ve been looking for is the ability to take the data and insights in these three products and put them to work,\u201d he said. This announcement should give them that.<\/p>\n Certainly finding talent and recruiting has also been a major use case for LinkedIn well before Microsoft bought the company, and the new Talent tool is about providing a direct integration with Microsoft\u2019s HR management functionality in Dynamics 365.\u00a0The new tool provides the ability for HR to source, recruit, onboard and retain employees while taking advantage of the data and tools inside LinkedIn, according the blog post.<\/p>\n Brent Leary, a partner at CRM Essentials sees this integration as a starting point that could become more automated down the road. \u201cI think generally this is a good first step in bringing LinkedIn\u00a0and Dynamics 365 together and it hints at the potential LinkedIn-Dynamics 365-artificial intelligence has for sales folks looking for automated relationship insights,\u201d Leary told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n Both of these solutions will be available in July.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Featured Image: Twin Design<\/a>\/Shutterstock<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunchIt\/~3\/7pl5h9lu2_A\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Microsoft announced some significant integrations between LinkedIn, the professional social network it bought last year for over $26 billion and Microsoft Dynamics 365, the company\u2019s CRM and ERP suite. It <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-4922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enterprise-software","tag-enterprise"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t