Microsoft Shows Off Project GigJam With Dynamics ERP and CRM in the Mix

Microsoft is adopting a more introspective approach to how people work, both its own employees and its customers. That was the message from CEO Satya Nadella today at Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2015. Nadella explained in his keynote address that Microsoft wants to solve business challenges by improving collaboration across applications and across devices. And one way Microsoft hopes to make that happen is through a new project called GigJam.

Achieving new levels of collaboration "requires us to get more involved, to get apps that work across devices," said Nadella, in his lead-in to the announcement of GigJam. "So we got a project started to find out what is that challenge. How [do we] deal with a task rather than an application. How do software and apps come together?"

Julia White, GM of Microsoft Office led a live demo that prominently featured Dynamics ERP and CRM. She began with a blank GigJam canvas for a scenario that involved helping a customer who had a product delivery issue. She used Cortana to add a customer list from Dynamics CRM, a sales order list from a Dynamics ERP system, and Outlook emails to the blank canvas. She then built ad hoc mappings between customers and sales orders on and filtered orders and emails down to a single customer.

Before sharing the linked up customer and order data, White crossed out specific orders from the list that ...