Salesforce.com announced its new Office Edition, an upgrade to the Winter ’04 version of its hosted CRM applications that lets users access their CRM data from within Microsoft Office.

The move promises to help Salesforce.com users increase their productivity, since it enables them to access key customer information hosted on Salesforce.com directly from within their Microsoft Word, Excel and Outlook applications. The version is strictly a one-way link, however, and it does not allow users to upload data from those Office apps to Salesforce.com, the company said.

Still, users said they were pleased with the new functionality. "The Salesforce.com Office Edition integrates my two most often used interfaces -- Salesforce.com for customer information and Microsoft Office for productivity applications," said Bo Coughlin, vice president of commercial business development at Time Warner Cable. "Being able to automatically generate customer proposals in Word and perform easy to use analytics directly in Excel using data from Salesforce.com will streamline the effectiveness of our business processes."

The new version is available now at no additional cost to current Salesforce.com users and is included in the standard subscription price, the company said.

For more information, visit Salesforce.com here.