ServiceNow embeds employee center in Microsoft Teams

As the two companies expand their strategic partnership, ServiceNow and Microsoft aim to integrate the workflows of IT, human resources, facilities, and procurement functions into Microsoft Teams.

As part of the ServiceNow Now Platform Rome version, ServiceNow is launching a staff center, which is a center for employees to find information and get help from various departments such as IT, human resources, facilities, and law. The general idea is that employees can save time on ordinary tasks, improve work efficiency, and possibly avoid burnout.

Under the Microsoft partnership, ServiceNow’s employee center will be available as a collaboration application that can be embedded in Teams. Collaboration applications are a set of team applications that can be used across chats, channels, and meetings. The result is that ServiceNow’s workflow engine will be available in Teams.

Microsoft uses “collaboration applications” in Teams to refer to existing business applications, which are supplemented by Microsoft’s own communication and collaboration functions and take advantage of the Teams interface. Jared Spataro, vice president of Microsoft Modern Work, said there are two types of collaboration applications. The first is an existing application that can be run in Teams. The second is to use the brand new application of Teams.

Spataro said that during the COVID-19 pandemic, Teams replaced Microsoft Outlook as the company’s most commonly used application. The cooperation with ServiceNow is the starting point for “meeting with employees in the workflow”.

If this atmosphere of workflow and messaging and collaboration applications sounds familiar, it’s because it is the next enterprise software battlefield. As work becomes mixed and automated, workflow engines running in collaboration applications (now mainly digital offices) will become critical. This vision is why Salesforce acquired Slack and integrated it before the Dreamforce meeting. This is why the latest version of ServiceNow has a lot of automated workflows and integration with Teams. This is why Zoomtopia’s Zoom spends a lot of time discussing workflow and how it integrates with video conferencing and collaboration.

Blake McConnell, the senior vice president of ServiceNow employee workflow products, said that embedding the employee center into Teams aims to improve the employee experience and simplify tasks. ServiceNow and Microsoft announced a strategic partnership in July 2019 and stated that they will now increase investment in products, customer success, and go-to-market plans. The two companies have been cooperating for more than ten years.

To date, ServiceNow and Microsoft have performed more than 30 native integrations between products. ServiceNow has adopted Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft is using ServiceNow IT service management and virtual agents integrated with Teams.

McConnell said that ServiceNow built Employee Center as a Microsoft collaboration application in about 6 weeks. Microsoft’s partnership is to bring ServiceNow’s workflow tools to employees no matter where they are. “Customers have spent undetermined time in Teams, and they should be able to stay there,” McConnell said.

Spataro said that with more integration plans, Teams’ employee center collaboration application is the first step in “a deeper relationship between the two companies.”