Microsoft is taking several approaches to try and grab customer interest to its products and away from what it competitors are offering.  Its recent marketing efforts, with no real surprise about their timing, come just in time for some major rivaling events.

Just in time for the VMworld 2011 conference that kicked off today, Microsoft released a trademark spoof portraying Ted, a VMlimited salesman, who’s looking to sell you virtualization instead of a cloud.  Its latest ad targeting the competition is not the only thing the software giant came up with, though.

Today it launched “Cloud CRM for Less” promotion for its cloud-based Dynamics CRM Online offering, meant to pull in SAP, Oracle and Salesforce customers. The deal made available between now and March 31, 2012 offers companies that purchase at least 50 licenses $150 per user. It comes with a catch however:

“To get the money back, companies need to sign a two-year licensing subscription deal for Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM Online.

Microsoft CRM Online is priced at $44 per user per month.”

Good marketing is one way of staying competitive, though Salesforce has been making gains thanks to another means recently: the social enterprise.  Cloud Extend launched last week, introducing the first rounded-out version of the sales force app designed to greatly simplify the platform for new users. One way it’s doing that is by mixing in Salesforce Chatter and LinkedIn integration.

Syncplicity also launched on Salesforce, just a couple of days after Cloud Extend. The app aims to streamline sales teams’ work by providing real-time sync and collaboration, eliminating the whole process of uploading and downloading often heavy files. Syncplicity is a cloud storage platform at its core that h can be accessed from within Salesforce as well as from other platforms.