Microsoft and salesforce.com announced a partnership Thursday to connect salesforce.com's customer relationship management apps and platform to Microsoft Office and Windows. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

"We are excited to partner with salesforce.com and help customers thrive in a mobile and cloud-first world," said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. "Working together we'll deliver new solutions that connect the customer insights of Salesforce to the cloud productivity of Office 365, the cloud platform of Azure and the mobility of Windows, so our customers can do more."

Among the solutions the two companies will deliver is Salesforce1 for Windows and Windows Phone 8.1, which will let Microsoft's customers access Salesforce and run their businesses from their Windows devices. A preview is planned in fall 2014, with general availability in 2015.

The companies will also offer Salesforce for Office 365. The new interoperability between Salesforce and Office 365 will allow users to access, share, edit and collaborate on Office content from within Salesforce and on Salesforce1 using Office Mobile, Office for iPad and Office 365. They will also be able to use OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online as integrated storage options for Salesforce. In addition, There will be a Salesforce App for Outlook and users will also be able to connect Salesforce data to Excel and use Power BI for Office 365 to visualize information and find new insights.

The collaboration is part of Microsoft's approach, which the company's CEO Satya Nadella calls "mobile first, cloud first."

Microsoft has been direct competitor of Salesforce.com with its Microsoft Dynamics suite of business tools.