Microsoft Corp. is making a strategic pit stop amid CEO Satya Nadella’s ambitious push to the cloud this morning with the announcement of a major upcoming update to the on-premise version of Dynamics CRM that will incorporate a host of enhancements from the cloud edition. Chief among them is better integration with the Cortana Analytics Suite.

The recently introduced package, which is delivered via Redmond’s infrastructure-as-a-service platform, combines the virtual assistant with some of its more advanced capabilities for collecting and storing information. But what Dynamics CRM users can look forward to the most are the pre-built analytics capabilities in the bundle, which are set to become available directly through the native interface.

The integration will take the form of cross-selling suggestions, tailored tips on how to approach customer complaints and automatic fetching of contextual information about leads, such as which company they work for and their position. That functionality will come on top of Cortana’s core recommendation capabilities, which have been extended to work with more of the data stored in Dynamics CRM.

As a result, each user will have a customized feed of the most relevant sales opportunities and projects to their area of focus. And they’ll be able to access records in other Microsoft products with similar ease thanks to improved integration with its OneDrive file locker, and, most importantly, Office.

Dynamics CRM 2016 will make it possible to opens documents and spreadsheets directly without having to tab over to the appropriate program, which should especially handy for the quick calculations that salespeople often find themselves making in Excel to estimate the value of deals and commissions. That functionality is set to become available both on the desktop version and the mobile clients, which are also receiving a big update.

The main highlight on that front is the incorporation of the field service management capabilities that Microsoft gained through its acquisition of partner FieldOne Systems LLC earlier this year. That will allow organizations that offer on-site support to their customers to make optimizations such as automatically assigning tasks the closest representative and quickly provide them with navigation instructions.

Photo via Adina Voicu