Last year, Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, but even though the acquisition has long closed, Microsoft hasn’t yet done much with all of the data it gets from the social network. At its Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida, the company announced some first steps in integrating LinkedIn’s social graph with its Office products.

Now don’t get too excited yet. What we’re talking about here is the integration of LinkedIn data with Office 365 profile cards. So assuming you don’t know much about your professional contacts and colleagues yet, you can now see more information about them right in Office 365 without having to go to their LinkedIn profiles (and potentially showing up as that one person who looked at their LinkedIn profile that week, which will surely trigger yet another LinkedIn email for them).

In addition to the slew of new products announced at Ignite, Microsoft’s enterprise technology conference in Orlando, the company also unveiled its plans for Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business. As rumored earlier this month, the former will supplant the latter. Microsoft Teams will become the core communications client in Office 365, eventually replacing the current Skype for Business client, though the company didn’t give a specific timeframe.

Microsoft Teams launched worldwide in March as part of Office 365. The company has been furiously updating it ever since, including as recently as earlier this month with guess access.

Microsoft is tapping the power of AI to provide customers of its Dynamics 365 business applications suite with new features. The company announced a series of capabilities at its Ignite conference today focused on bringing intelligence to business processes, including a pre-built chatbot designed to field customer service queries.

Bots will soon be able to join video conversations in 1:1 and group Skype calls, Microsoft announced today.

Bot builders can use the BotBuilder RealTimeMediaCalling extension on Github, now in preview, to bring Skype bots into video conversations. A software development kit for the creation of interactive Skype video bots will be released at an undetermined date, a Skype spokesperson told VentureBeat.

“This platform provides real-time, voice and video streams of a Skype call which allows developers to build personal, immersive communications experiences with services and brands,” Skype said in a blog post today.

Microsoft wants to make AI available to all developers through its “intelligent cloud” and accessible to devices at the “intelligent edge.” At its Build developer conference in Seattle this morning, the company explained its vision, which is organized around the interaction of the cloud, data and devices.

While established players like Adobe, Salesforce, and Marketo are rarely mentioned in the same breath as tech’s “Frightful Five“—Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft—there is increasing evidence that tech’s giants are eyeing martech. And they’re bringing superior talent, vertical advantages, and astronomical budgets with them.

Look at it this way: the dynamic is already widespread on Google. Because of Google’s monopolistic control over the search engine space, SEO and martech tools are beholden to Google’s whims. Ultimately, Google controls the flow of data. If it wanted to cut off a company like Moz and build its own tool, it could. The push into martech has already begun. Amazon offers a marketing stack under the Alexa banner, while Amazon Web Services dominates cloud-computing. 

According to Brinker, there’s an even bigger disruptive force coming from tech giants: new client interfaces like Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Google Home, VR and AR, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Voice-enabled computing and other new client interface technologies could disrupt the entire customer journey. Rather than visit a homepage or a company Facebook page, potential customers could simply tell their Alexa devices to buy a product. Amazon becomes the only player in that experience, leaving martech vendors on the outside looking in. Eventually, marketers may have to use software provided by these major platforms just to survive.

On the marketing front, Microsoft is advising larger business customers who want marketing capabilities to go with Adobe's Marketing Cloud. But on the SMB side, Microsoft is building a new, different marketing app. Microsoft officials have declined to provide anything beyond the pricing ($40 per user per month) and Spring 2017 timing for the coming Dynamics 365 Marketing App.

• Reporting by Digiday found that, although brands and agencies never took to enterprise chat app Slack, they are now drawn to Slack competitors like Microsoft Teams and Facebook Workplace, which offer solutions technology that better fits their needs. Teams was announced just a few weeks ago, and Workplace launched in October. 
• Other reasons for the gravitation away from Slack might include the lower cost of Workplace in particular, and the fact that Slack is a standalone app, while the competition offers a robust suite of features that go beyond chat.
• Microsoft Teams isn’t formally released yet, but is being tested by companies that use Office 365; Facebook Workplace has already been adopted by more than 1,000 companies, including TBWA Worldwide, Weber Shandwick, Starbucks and Heineken.

Early SaaS adopters bought Salesforce applications. Latter-day salesforce automation implementers are buying Microsoft applications as cloud services.

That means Microsoft in the second quarter of 2016 took the leader's post ahead of Salesforce in the overall software-as-a-service market, according to John Dinsdale, director of research at the Reno, Nev., based Synergy Research Group.

Microsoft moved into that position powered mainly by its strength in selling collaborative SaaS software used in salesforce automation and elsewhere in the enterprise, such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Dynamics ERP, Dynamics AX, which includes accounting, inventory, HR, and other applications. The collaboration segment of SaaS grew at a 37% rate in the second quarter, or faster than the SaaS market as a whole, Synergy reported Sept. 1.

Get the entire Office 365 document-sharing how-to in our handy Office 365 Document Sharing Deep Dive PDF download. Or read each section in your browser:

Introduction: What Office 365 and OneDrive offer both individuals and teams.
Part 1: How to get and set up all the Office 365 components.
Part 2: How to share Office 365 documents directly with other people from the Office apps.
Part 3: How to access and use documents stored in OneDrive from any and all of your devices.
Part 4: How to share any documents -- not only Office 365 docs -- with both individuals and groups at your organization.