Microsoft integrates Teams with SAP as partnership expands.

Integrations of enterprise applications with Teams channels would be the "next level of maturity" for the popular collaboration platform.

Microsoft has outlined plans to integrate Teams with a variety of SAP enterprise applications, enabling workers to share information more easily without leaving the collaboration platform.

The two companies announced that the enterprise resource planning (ERP) application S/4HANA from the German enterprise software provider, used by many of the world's largest organizations, will be connected to Microsoft's collaboration platform. This will allow SAP users to share information, such as supplier details, with colleagues within Teams without switching screens, for example.

There are also plans for integrations with the SAP SuccessFactors HR application, which will provide new ways for staff to share knowledge and learn skills, and SAP Sales Cloud, enabling direct customer calls from the customer relationship management (CRM) platform, for instance.

The announcement was part of a broader agreement that will see SAP S/4HANA hosted on Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure. Integrations between Teams, which has 115 million daily active users, and SAP products are "planned for delivery by mid-2021," according to a statement.

"By integrating Microsoft Teams into our solution portfolio, we will take collaboration to the next level, shaping the future of work together and enabling a frictionless enterprise," said SAP CEO Christian Klein.

Teams already integrates with a handful of popular business applications, including human resources and sales tools like Workday, the human resources software provider, while Salesforce and Microsoft announced integration with the CRM software provider's Sales and Service Cloud products in October. There are also integrations between Teams and Microsoft's Dynamics 365 platform.