My plan was for my next article to be the second part in my Adxstudio Portals Primer but last night, when setting up the demo for the first part of the series, I noticed this on the Adxstudio site. If you missed it, there is a Salesforce logo with the word ‘CONNECT’.
It was late so I took the screenshot (thankfully) and figured I would investigate in the morning. Foolishly I did not even click through. I sent an email to Microsoft (I won’t mention names, given what happened and because of my MVP NDA) and went to bed. Imagine my surprise this morning when the same site looked like this.
The logo is gone and there is a white line in what I assume was a hasty removal. You can go to the site now and see it for yourself (unless they have fixed it up).
Salesforce Connect
Googling “Salesforce Connect” leads to a service launched at the end of last year which describes itself as an “App Cloud Integration Service” which connects to services, including Microsoft.
I know that Salesforce does not have much of a portal solution. The best they offer is ‘Communities’. Dig into the links and you end up at the Service Cloud but no portal offering. To my knowledge, there is nothing like Adxstudio Portals for Salesforce so it makes sense Salesforce would want to fill in this gap.
The Microsoft and Salesforce Love In
We know that Microsoft tried to acquire Salesforce last year but failed and Satya has been talking about Microsoft and Salesforce collaborating on the Office suite so it makes sense that they also collaborate on providing portal solutions.
Is Dynamics CRM/Adxstudio Portals the new “collaborative service” for Salesforce?
My Speculated Model
Salesforce Connect is used to link Salesforce to web services. Dynamics CRM (and by extension Adxstudio Portals) has a web service layer. Therefore it makes sense that Salesforce is using Adxstudio Portals through this web service, via Salesforce Connect.
My guess is the connection will be pre-configured to only use the entities defined for Adxstudio although this would include Accounts, Contacts, Cases, Leads and possibly Opportunities.
In fact it begs the question why you would use Salesforce if you needed a web portal in the first place and cut straight to the chase and deploy Dynamics CRM.
***STOP PRESS*** A Bit More Detective Work
Given the hasty removal there is obviously nothing known publicly yet (which is good because if I knew anything ‘off the record’ I would be bound by my MVP NDA) but a few enquiries with people ‘in the know’ revealed the website http://www.adxstudio4salesforce.com is active. Click through this link to get the full story before it is taken down, like the logo link.
That CRM Blog 
You got me!
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Is this what you are going to talk about in Sydney CRM UG this week?
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No, I will be talking about part one of the primer 😉
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Well, Leon. This all sounds like many of the actions I’ve seen when Microsoft has links to old dying technology that does the following.
1. It gets the last few bucks out of the old dying technology.
2. It provides a way to move the functions of the old dying technology to the new Microsoft Technology.
Buying them would have made this quicker, but now they have to do it the slow way.
Recently a company approached me about giving them some help because their present third party product only worked for SF, but they are developing the app now for CRMOL and Azure.
Why? His answer was that SF is only growing 20 percent of what Microsoft’s offerings are growing.
Sure, MSFT will make some of it’s products work with SF. But when a CFO looks at the cost of a seat with MSFT and the cost of SF seat and sees that the MSFT tech is right there to jump too, then it’s going to happen.
Well, it’s just my humble opinion. IT’s just that history repeats itself.
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