Incentive rolls out Microsoft Dynamics 365-based collaboration

Incentive Inc., a provider of collaboration-as-a-platform solutions, has launched Dynamics Connect, a tool fully embedded in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Edition that enables colleagues to collaborate more effectively via team chats as well as by co-authoring documents, sharing files, delegating tasks, and social networking.

The idea behind Dynamics Connect is to embed a collaborative experience into a business tool that people would actually want to use to collaborate, says CEO Rickard Hansson. Dynamics Connect is also Incentive's first vendor-specific offering.

"We've always worked very closely with Microsoft and our whole stack is Microsoft technology from the bottom up, so we just decided to explore what kind of collaborative experience there is in Dynamics 365 today, which I would say is kind of slim to nothing and spread out throughout the tool," Hansson told MSDynamicsWorld.

Users can connect some Office 365 features into Dynamics 365 but it's very sporadic and companies have to pay additional licensing fees to make that work, Hansson says.

So Incentive decided to branch out and embed its complete collaboration-as-a-platform solution into Dynamics 365. Hansson says the integration of its platform with Dynamics 365 is just the first of such integrations for the company.

Hansson says Dynamics Connect does not compete with Office 365 because Incentive's collaboration tool also integrates with Office 365, as well as with OneDrive.

"We are actually making Office 365 more accessible in Dynamics 365 than [Microsoft] does itself," he says. "There is nothing close to what we are delivering in terms of the user experience. It is completely embedded and always there. You can tap ...