What Happened to “Teams and Outlook Collaboration?” Viva for Sales Took It!

There was a section in the Dynamics 365 Sales 2022 release wave 2 that I was particularly excited about. I talked about it here, on the CRM Rocks podcast with Markus Erlandsson. There were Outlook integration enhancements that I was so excited for! And when I navigated back to that page of the Dynamics 365 for Sales release notes…. it was GONE! In its place, this disclaimer/note about Viva for Sales:

What does this mean?? 😕

Well… it is simple:

Viva for Sales: Is this free?

Nope! But it is included with select Dynamics 365 licenses. Viva for Sales is included at no additional cost for users with Sales Enterprise or Sales Premium licenses (see footnote 2 in this screenshot from Microsoft’s website about Dynamics 365 for Sales pricing).

If you’re using Sales Professional licenses, Viva for Sales comes at an additional cost of $40 per user per month. Which basically means you should just bump up your license to be Sales Professional~

I’m not crazy about moving the Outlook changes that were supposedly part of the main release into something that now costs extra for a large number of users. What do you think?

What is Viva for Sales?

Here is the full Microsoft site that tells you everything you need to know about Viva. It includes a ton of integrations with Dynamics 365 (or Salesforce CRM), Teams and the entire Microsoft 365 connection. It uses AI, conversational intelligence capabilities and automatically connects CRM customers into all Office applications. There’s sharing contact cards, automatically adding meetings and phone calls to records, identifying coworkers who had meaningful interactions with customers and much, much more.

Here’s a great video you can check out that gives you an overview of how it will work:

Is this available now?

Viva for Sales is not generally available yet, but it is in preview. The release notes show October 2022 as General Availability date. I can’t wait to play with it!