by: Andrew Karasev
Following the direction of Project Green Microsoft Business Solutions renamed its products: Microsoft Great Plains, Navision, Axapta, Solomon and MS CRM into Microsoft Dynamics GP, Nav, Ax, Sl, CRM. Microsoft Dynamics will be supposedly final product of the Project Green, when user will have access to all the business components through similar interface. At this point (fall of 2005) we do not know exactly how interface will look like, but some directions could be predicted.
• Microsoft Outlook interface. In September 2005 Microsoft released Small Business Accounting, entry level accounting application, written from scratch. Obviously now it is not a time to reinvent the wheel/create new accounting package… however if you are Microsoft... Microsoft has its users and professionals legions who are very comfortable in Microsoft Office products and who spend a lot of computer time in MS Outlook. Small Business Accounting allows users to create and synchronize accounting documents in MS Outlook (not all of them, but the innovation way is clear – user should be able to work with business application from MS Outlook). This might be very good argument against non-Microsoft systems: Oracle eBusiness/Financials, PeopleSoft, IBM Lotus Notes/Domino, JD Edwards – who do not have simple unification for user interface
• MS SQL Server db platform. If you look at such products as Great Plains Software Dynamics – it was intended for multiplatform databases. Now it is on MS SQL Server only. Also – the way of Navision – it was designed on its own C/Side database platform, which was solid rock. Now Navision is available on MS SQL Server
• Microsoft Business Portal. Microsoft Dynamics GP is simplifying its user interface (still being Microsoft Dexterity application) to look like Microsoft Office/Outlook interface. At the same time Microsoft is moving more functionality to Microsoft Business Portal: Employee self service, Fixed Assets, Customer Order Management (former eOrder). Microsoft Business Portal will have open SDK, available for C#.Net programmer – and Microsoft Business Portal is.Net application. Probably in the future all the proprietary customization tools, such as Microsoft Dexterity will be replaced with Microsoft Visual Studio.