One of the most notable take-aways from Dreamforce, interestingly enough, had to do with Microsoft. It isn’t about a contentious relationship, it’s about a rather agreeable and widening partnership.

You may have heard the rumors about Microsoft attempting to negotiate an acquisition of Salesforce earlier this year. Although that didn’t materialize (reportedly, Salesforce wanted about 40% more than Microsoft was willing to pay – a cool $70B), discussions clearly led to a remarkable relationship that starts at the top.

Indeed Marc Benioff welcomed John Thompson, the Chairman of Microsoft, on stage for a quick chat. “What’s your dream going forward?” Benioff asked Thompson. Thompson expressed excitement for cloud computing and the explosion of data from the Internet of things (IoT).

That set the stage for one of the key topics of this year’s conference — IoT. Salesforce’s newly announced IoT Cloud connects billions of events from devices, sensors, and applications to Salesforce — which in turn enables companies to unlock insights from a “connected world.”

The IoT Cloud is powered by Salesforce Thunder, a massively scalable, real-time event processing engine designed to enable Salesforce customers to personalize the way they sell, service, market and more.

The IoT Cloud will supposedly bring much needed context to the billions of real-time events and digital content that occur all around us. I say “supposedly” not because I don’t believe it won’t happen, but because at this point in time it hasn’t happened. And it won’t happen any time soon for any but the largest of Salesforce customers and partners.

Meanwhile, Salesforce and Microsoft are delivering on their initial partnership announced last October, with the rollout of two new integrations: Salesforce App for Outlook and Salesforce1 Mobile App for Microsoft Office. Indeed, Microsoft played a major role in Dreamforce announcements this year.

In a statement reinforcing the collaboration with Salesforce, CEO Satya Nadella, positioned Microsoft as a “platform and productivity company,” now aimed at bringing together the best of Microsoft Azure, Office and Windows with partners like Salesforce.

I’ve never thought of Salesforce as a productivity company. On the other-hand, apps like OneNote and Office 365 are productivity tools and they just so happen to be subjects of the other big news from the event. Dreamforce this year announced an integration of OneNote, Skype for Business, and Office 365 into Salesforce along with the creation of a Windows 10 Salesforce app.

The OneNote-Salesforce integration will let users associate notes with Salesforce records and view and edit notes directly in OneNote. Notes from OneNote can also be viewed and edited directly from Salesforce. This is great news for my ears as I frequently use OneNote to capture screenshots and notes during clients calls and dreamed of an easy way to associate them with my CRM records.

This comes on the heels of two recently available products: the Salesforce App for Outlook and the Salesforce1 Mobile App for Microsoft Office. But integration between Microsoft’s other offerings and Salesforce Lightning isn’t yet available. In fact, they aren’t expected until the second half of 2016 at the earliest.

Moving on to the third key element of focus at the event, SalesforceIQ. SalesforceIQ is the rebranding of RelateIQ (a company Salesforce acquired last year). SalesforceIQ is designed to capture inferential data from emails, meetings, and logged calls and then present intelligent suggestions and timely reminders for things like new meeting appointments and follow-up actions.

I love the concept of using inferential data to eliminate time spent on searching for past activity for the purpose of formulating action plans and next steps. However, the solution has a long way to go before it can be wholly relied on.

The last thing I’d like to mention is my appreciation for the sponsors of our first Smart Selling Tools Dream Lounge and all the sales and marketing practitioners and speakers. Representatives from SAVO Group, Qstream, Velocify, Alinean, Aviso, and VorsightBP were in demand by prospects looking for smart ways to improve sales performance.

Also on hand were two lucky winners of Apple Watches: Barry Posner of The Leadership Challenge and Paul Philleo of Events for Gaming, along with the lucky winner of our $1,000 cash prize, Philip Wang from Coalfire.

Dreamforce is one of those exhilarating events that I look forward to the minute the current one ends. It’s an exciting time for businesses looking to improve sales productivity for sure, but we’re still at the very beginning of the thrilling ride ahead.

These were some of the big announcements at Dreamforce. However, there were certainly a number of exciting announcements and innovation to be seen by the 500 or so exhibitors at the event. In the pages to follow, you’ll learn about 23 of the solutions we named as Cool Tools at this year’s event.

Leverage Alinean to develop and deliver value conversation guides and content, interactive infographics, diagnostic assessments, and ROI & TCO calculators and business case tools.

Convert “Do Nothing” to “Yes”, increase deal size and improve competitive win rates.

Apttus provides comprehensive Quote-to-Cash solutions built on the Salesforce1 platform. Unlike other systems Apttus Quote-to-Cash doesn’t require extensive coding and provides an integrated view of all customers, quotes and contracts – helping you drive revenue growth, reduce delays, and improve customer loyalty. 

With Avention(SM), you can uncover leads, market segments, and business insights in ways that were previously impossible. Within seconds, learn what businesses are talking about, who the contacts are, and which companies fit the criteria that’s important in your prospecting.

Aviso delivers a powerful data-science driven sales performance solution to optimize performance, prioritize deals, deploy resources, and exceed sales goals. Aviso automates the sales process, enables a real-time forecast in minutes and empowers leaders to knowwhere they are compared to plan atany time.

CallidusCloud enables organizations to accelerate their lead to money process with a complete suite that identifies the right leads, ensures proper territory and quota distribution, enables sales teams, automates configuration, pricing and quoting, and streamline sales compensation.

ClearSlide’s platform and real-time analytics help sales and marketing teams more successfully engage with customers on the phone, in-person, or via email. You get alerts, real-time analytics, and insight into how customers interact with content so you can achieve better business outcomes.

With Clari, sales execs and managers get new insight to help run their regions more efficiently and coach their teams more effectively. And Clari captures sales rep and customer activity — often automatically — cutting data-entry time by 75% and giving reps more time to sell.

DemoChimp is an interactive demo platform that personalizes video and documents so each prospect automatically learns about your solution in the most relevant way. Automating custom product demos has cut sales cycles by 68% and jumped close rates 44%.

KnowledgeTree’s sales enablement & acceleration software uses Data Science to determine what content most effectively advances deals. It uses real sales results to proactively push best practice content to your reps, right in Salesforce.com. There’s no portal & no searching!

Hushly is a new way to nurture anonymous visitors. It’s a safety-net to capture more higher quality leads and increase the ROI of your gated content. Leads captured by Hushly are auto-enriched with your visitor's LinkedIn profile and automatically published to your marketing automation and CRM.

DocuSign helps businesses of all sizes easily and securely sign, send, and manage documents in the cloud, with unmatched availability and legal enforceability. Go mobile and start signing, sending and storing documents from any device. It’s easy to send, sign and store documents using DocuSign.

InsideView provides B2B organizations with data, social and news insights, and business connections on their customers, leads, and partners to help drive marketing effectiveness and deliver sales results. With InsideView, you can find better leads, win more deals, and maintain and grow your customers.

LiveHive’s next generation sales acceleration platform, combines real-time engagement analytics and email automation capabilities to trim inefficiency and bulk up your team’s productivity, and follow-up effectiveness. Capabilities include email templates, group email, and email sequencing.

Blending mobile, gamification, brain science and big data, Qstream allows you to measure the strengths of your sales force in minutes a day. Reps engage in fun, scenario-based sales challenges on their mobile device. You get insights including targeted coaching opportunities and confidence indicators.

MobilePaks arms your sellers with content and training bursts predictively matched to prospect and buying cycle. This just-in-time support helps them take their conversations to the next level. Plus MobilePaks captures information on usage and competency so you can maximize content and training ROI.

Qvidian solutions enable companies to access, assemble, deliver, and measure sales content. Sales teams improve effectiveness and optimize productivity. You get real-time insight to ensure they do what’s needed to win, by driving repeatable methodologies and making your organizationmore agile.

Who’s most likely to buy and who’ll buy more? SalesPredict can show you. We use predictive analytics with your CRM and marketing automation data along with 1,000’s of external sources to accurately score leads and accounts and to provide buying signal insights so you can close more prospects faster.

Seismic’s content platform serves up contextually-relevant sales materials reps can easily personalize for each sales interaction. Assessable at any time from any device, our customers dramatically increase time spent selling, improve win rates, and foster better client experiences.

MobilePaks arms your sellers with content and training bursts predictively matched to prospect and buying cycle. This just-in-time support helps them take their conversations to the next level. Plus MobilePaks captures information on usage and competency so you can maximize content and training ROI.

SpringCM helps get your deals closed faster by automating the biggest bottleneck in your sales cycle: the contract management process. The solution provides a clear paper trail of document changes by user. Questions like “Who has the contract?” and“Where is the contract stuck?”are no longer needed.

Yesware is an all-in-one sales toolkit for data-driven sales organizations. We help you connect with prospects, track customer engagement, and close more deals, right from Gmail, Outlook, or your iPhone. Automatically sync tracked sales emails, calls, and presentations to Salesforce without leaving your inbox.

Velocify’s powerful sales dialer, combined with automated sales communication, ensures every prospect is contacted in a highly responsive, accelerated manner. With a precisely choreographed sales strategy, Velocify automatically prioritizes activities across your entire sales organization.

VorsightBP offers a revolutionary alternative to mediocre of sales training. Whether internal or by outside firms, most selling improvement initiatives focus on the wrong problems or only address symptoms. VorsightBP replaces hope with results, theoretical with practical, complicated with elemental.