When Microsoft launched Viva last year, it framed the platform as an employee portal where you might go to find out parental leave policy or other internal communications directed more generally at company policies and culture. It further reinforced this idea last month when it released Viva Goals, a Viva module designed to give employees access to their KPIs.

But it seems that Microsoft has broader ambitions for Viva than simply providing important information for employees found in the typical employee intranet. Today, it announced the first of what could be multiple jobs supported inside Viva, starting with sales.

Emily He, corporate vice president in charge of business applications at Microsoft, says that this announcement is something that brings information together in a way for specific jobs that she’s been hearing about as a kind of employee holy grail for years across companies and jobs, and it was one of the reasons she was drawn to Microsoft.

“Viva Sales in my mind really represents a new way of working by breaking down silos of data and breaking down silos of experience,” she told TechCrunch.

She said one thing she has learned in working with salespeople is that they have too many tools and they need a way to pull meaningful information out of the tools they are using to present it in a more centralized way. “They really want a more simplified experience. So Viva Sales enables a seller to use the tools they already love and use every day including your email system like Outlook, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, as well as Teams,” she said.

The tool is built on Office 365 and tuned for Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM. By tagging a customer name or contact, Viva Sales can pull the documents, spreadsheets, presentations, emails and other materials into the CRM tool automatically, all organized under the tag, greatly reducing the amount of manual data entry required.

“Sellers do spend a lot of time manually entering account information or forecasting data. So this eliminates [much of the] manual data entry. But more importantly, now it generates a more holistic view of the customer,” He told me.