For those unfamiliar, Nintex Forms and Nintex Workflow are a suite of products that sit on top of SharePoint and provide a web based designer for development of online forms and business process workflows. We have used their products for years and we recommend them over using SharePoint Designer (hard to deploy and re-use, lots of governance issues) or Visual Studio (developer centric) in cases where business users want to build their own forms and business process workflows.
Nintex announced today that their Nintex Workflow product will provide business process workflow integration between Office 365, Salesforce and Dynamics CRM. Scenarios for integration could includ
- Drive business processes in SharePoint in response to events in CRM so work flows better between previously siloed systems
- Automate the process of creating, updating, retrieving, and querying records in Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics using simple drag-and-drop workflow actions
- Post status updates, links and polls to Salesforce Chatter or Microsoft Yammer, and progress workflows based on user responses in social channels
Nintex has also announced that they have partnered with DocuSign to integrate digital signature management into their workflow product.
SalesForce has been a competitor for Microsoft for several years now, in particular with its existing product, Dynamics CRM. Microsoft has a web page dedicated to illustrating why Dynamics CRM is better than Salesforce.
At the end of May, Microsoft announced a strategic partnership with Salesforce. This partnership promises deeper integration between Salesforce and Microsoft including:
- Native Windows Phone Support
- Sharing of Office 365 Documents in Salesforce
- Integration of OneDrive with Salesforce
- Using Salesforce within Outlook
- Use of Microsoft SQL Server as the database for ExactTarget (one of Salesforce’s products)
- Integration of Salesforce apps into Office 365
- Querying of Salesforce data in Power Query / Power BI
As with Oracle and SAP, Microsoft engages in co-opetition, partnering on some initiatives such as cloud hosting, integration and sharing while competing fiercely on other fronts.
