Workday, Microsoft to streamline work experience

Microsoft and Workday that provides enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, have announced a global, strategic partnership to expand the business solutions joint customers can use to continually optimize the way work gets done. The companies have released plans to deliver integrations that mirror where and how customers want to work across Microsoft Office 365 and Workday’s finance and HR applications. Aneel Bhusri, co-founder and CEO, Workday said, “Our partnership with Microsoft is yet another example of our commitment to empowering customers to increase productivity and drive performance with Workday — all in an intuitive experience that mirrors how they prefer to work.”

“Connecting the productivity tools in Office 365 with Workday’s finance and HR applications will enable customers globally to uncover new ways to produce great work that ultimately drives their businesses forward.”

The integration aims to enable customers to simplify day-to-day tasks, foster collaboration, and increase productivity. Set to begin in the second quarter of 2017, both the companies plan to continually work together to deliver additional, deeper connections between their solutions in order to help companies around the world transform their businesses. “Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet, and key to this is forging strategic partnerships with companies including Workday,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft.

“Blending the power of Workday’s cloud-based finance and HR applications with the cloud productivity of Office 365 will enable our customers to simplify their businesses processes, enhance collaboration, and infuse more intelligence into their organizations.”

How will the integration work?

According to the both the companies, the solution is designed to work as per the functioning of customers, as they already spend a significant part of their day working between Microsoft Office 365 and Workday applications. The new integrations aims to further streamline this work experience, enabling joint customers to:

• Help simplify collaboration and better adapt to continuous organizational changes across organizations, teams, and projects. By leveraging the Microsoft Graph API, this integration enables organizational changes within Workday to be automatically reflected in Office 365 Groups.

For example, should an employee move to another team, the Office 365 Groups they belong to will automatically reflect this change across email, calendars, and shared documents.

• Help Simplify day-to-day tasks to increase productivity by enabling Microsoft Flow and Workday’s dynamic business process framework, customers can be free of routine tasks and manual processes by automating workflow across any third-party applications in the Microsoft Flow ecosystem and Workday.

For example, a manager can set up an automated workflow for a new employee in Workday, which adds the new hire to specific groups on third-party messaging and chat services. From there, an automated welcome message will introduce the new hire to the group.

• Allow maximization of time and resources by connecting Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) with the Microsoft Graph, which will provide people and teams with rich, actionable insights into the company’s communication and collaboration trends. Using Microsoft MyAnalytics (formerly Delve Analytics), employees will be able to better understand how, when, and with whom they are spending their time as well as ways to make the most of it.

For example, employees could determine the average time spent in meetings, response times to their emails, their most frequent collaboration partners or how many emails they have exchanged with their managers and peers.