Workday adds collaboration tools, buddies up with Microsoft

Cloud HCM and financials vendor Workday delivered three long-awaited new products at its annual Rising conference today, at the same time as embedding collaborative spreadsheet, messaging and video tools in its platform. But a surprise alliance with Microsoft earned the biggest round of spontaneous applause, when CEO Aneel Bhusri revealed an integration that will allow Workday users to book time off directly from their Outlook calendar.

The unexpected partnership with Microsoft will connect Workday’s HR and finance products into Office 365, automatically updating workflow, organizational changes and employee information. Workday becomes this week’s second addition to Microsoft’s list of BFFs, after yesterday’s announcement that Adobe’s Marketing Cloud is now the preferred accompaniment to Dynamics 365 and will host on Azure.

Bhusri highlighted two further forms of integration in addition to the crowd-pleasing Outlook integration:

    The ability to automate workflow across Microsoft Flow and Workday’s dynamic business process framework. For example, a manager can set up an automated workflow for a new hire in Workday, which adds them to specific groups on messaging and chat services, and introduces them to the group with an automated welcome message.
    Integration from Workday to Office 365 Groups that automatically carries across organizational changes from Workday into Office 365. For example, as soon as an employee moves to another team within Workday, the groups they belong to in Office 365 automatically update across email, calendars, and shared documents.

In a recorded video, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emphasized the use of machine intelligence to interpret Workday’s organizational data within Office 365, using the Microsoft Graph API and its collaboration analytics tools. Workday’s Bhusri promised further benefits from the collaboration, in addition to the announced features, which will roll out across two forthcoming releases, Workday 28 and 29.

Full article at http://diginomica.com/2016/09/27/workday-adds-collaboration-tools-buddies-up-with-microsoft/

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