Bob Stutz, the former Microsoft Corp. vice president who led the development of Dynamics CRM 2016,  wasn’t around to announce the news of its launch this week following his recent defection to Salesforce.com Inc. Fortunately, newly prompted right-hand man Jujhar Singh had no trouble stepping up to the plate. The latest iteration of Redmond’s customer relationship management platform is now generally available with a raft of new features promising to help make deal-making much more efficient in the enterprise.

The main highlight is integration with the Cortana Analytics Suite, which combines the personal digital assistant after which it’s named with data management services from Microsoft’s public cloud and pre-built business intelligence workflows to help salespeople better understand their customers. Dynamics CRM 2016 uses the toolkit to automatically generate cross-selling recommendations based on the specific preferences of a prospect and scan social network for messages that are indicative of potential deal-making opportunities.

The functionality is a direct response to the analytics capabilities Salesforce.com has been adding to its competing customer management platform over the last few years, an effort that will now be headed by none other than ex-Microsofter Stutz. Redmond is not settling for merely leveling the playing field, however. The company hopes to up the ante by exploiting its leadership position in the productivity market with Office.

Dynamics CRM 2016 comes with templates for organizing customer data in Excel spreadsheets, personalization features to help simplify the creation of Word sales documents and extensive support for the collaboration features of the cloud-based Office 365. And just to top it off, Microsoft has also added SharePoint integration into the mix. The result is a considerably more appealing platform than the previous iteration that should be able to put up a much better fight against Salesforce.com.

Image via Microsoft