On January 23, Microsoft announced a change to Office 365 Pro Plus. This change will make Bing the default search engine in Google Chrome.

SugarCRM – a well-established player in the market for CRM platforms – recently rolled out its Fall 2019 release. From a functional perspective, the release does a good job advancing SugarCRM’s capabilities in the areas of self-service, collaboration, and sales automation.

SAP’s Digital Interconnect Group recently announced the launch of SAP Contact Center 365. In conjunction with its incumbent solutions for customer experience – particularly SAP Service Cloud – the move expands the viability of SAP as an end-to-end technology partner for contact center and customer service enablement.

Microsoft Teams’ latest innovations offer a range of benefits for healthcare organizations.

This is the third maintenance release since Sakai 19 was released in spring 2019. Thanks to its open-source community, Sakai is continuously providing fixes, security updates, and improvements to its users.

Zoom Video Communications has announced an array of offerings for 2020 at its third-annual Zoomtopia Conference.

Salesforce recently announced the introduction of two new vertical-specialized solutions: Consumer Goods Cloud and Manufacturing Cloud. The introduction is a clear signal that Salesforce is pushing ahead with its approach to create industry-specialized versions of its popular Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service solutions.

Freshworks recently published a study showing that only 12% of customer relationship management (CRM) users leverage an AI-based tool.

Cisco Systems has announced several enhancements to its collaboration portfolio, which includes new software and hardware solutions and a partnership with Microsoft.

iSpring expands its product offering with Flora LMS, a subscription-based course-selling platform targeted at business trainers, edupreneurs, and training companies.

ClickSoftware has been a mainstay of the field service automation (FSA) space. While Salesforce is a recognized market leader in general customer service management (CSM) arena, its capabilities for FSA have lagged behind others. The acquisition of ClickSoftware will provide Salesforce not just a roster of accounts, but intellectual property that can be folded into its Field Service Lightning Solution.

It is likely that Mitel will acquire Avaya, following news that Avaya CEO Jim Chirico stated he would be seeking “strategic alternatives” during the company’s August 13 third quarter earnings call.

Using natural language processing on call recordings and providing automated sales coaching insights has been an area of intense interest with many players in the market – Gong being a current frontrunner. At Dreamforce 2019, Salesforce also threw its hat into the ring with Einstein Call Coaching.

Swit has launched a new Advanced tier for its collaboration suite, enabling innovative cross-team collaboration for small and large organizations.

Cisco is beginning to lose patience with its Zoom interoperability after another Zoom security risk: access for the Zoom Connector for Cisco hosted on zoom.us did not require authentication, allowing external users to join a Zoom meeting without password credentials.

With the bulk of the millennial generation now fully in the workforce and moving into decision-maker roles, the way business gets done is changing. And it involves a lot more collaboration over video, according to a new report from Lifesize.

Conversational UIs allow users to interact naturally with applications. Salesforce recently made a foray into the space with its Einstein Voice Assistant solution.

Salesforce is a juggernaut in the customer experience solution space – at Dreamforce 2019, it announced a strategic partnership with Amazon to bolster their respective plays in the contact center space.

Microsoft Teams received a bevy of new capabilities that focus on new ways to customize the experience for users and manage the workflow for administrators, all announced at Microsoft’s annual infrastructure-focused Ignite conference in Orlando on Nov. 4.

Fluid Framework, unveiled in May at Microsoft’s Build 2019 company conference, lets developers rally the help of near real-time coauthoring, reusable mix-and-match document components, and digital assistants like translator aids in the content creation experience at speeds and scale not available before.

Apple’s attention-getting new hardware announcements played up a lot of new camera features and screen quality upgrades. While web conferencing users who rely on their mobile device to join work meetings will enjoy some incremental improvements, not all of the features showcased in the reveal keynote will make a difference.