Microsoft extends Dynamics support, promises roadmaps
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Microsoft announced a major support upgrade, clearer road maps for its Dynamics range of business applications and new financing.
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InfoWorld - Taking a page from major enterprise software providers like Oracle and SAP, Microsoft announced this week Business Ready Customer Care, an initiative that includes major enhancements to its maintenance and support program for Microsoft Dynamics, ERP and CRM, applications.
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Microsoft is expanding a plan to draw mainframe customers to Windows for high-end applications. Under a program with the internal code name Mission Critical Microsoft, the company is trying to extend its current
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Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced several moves it says will help its business customers take advantage of a technology called virtualization, and in the process help the software maker catch up with VMware Inc., the frontrunner in that area.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft introduced the first in a planned series of online communities for users of its Dynamics applications to provide forums where peers can exchange best practices. Centered around specific industries or job titles, the first community is aimed at finance professionals such as corporate controllers, finance managers and accountants. The software vendor made the announcement at its Convergence 2007 conference in San Diego as a way to help its Dynamics customers better connect with their external communities of customers, suppliers and partners. "You can think of it as the MySpace for financial professionals," said Satya Nadella, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Business Solutions group. "It's how you can have a Convergence [show] 365 days a year." In talking to customers, one of their main reasons for attending the Convergence show is to engage with their peers, said James Utzschneider, general manager of Dynamics marketing at Microsoft. The vendor has been spending a lot of time recently looking at the Web 2.0 world to discover how the social network technology mostly aimed at teenagers could be applied to a business setting, he added. Microsoft demonstrated the online community concept at last year's Convergence conference and plans to bring more communities online later this year. The online finance community can be accessed on Microsoft's Dynamics Web site. . It features forums, blogs, articles, columns and tagging. While Microsoft has created the fabric of the site, the vendor intends it to be run by the community, according to Craig Dewar, director of Microsoft's Dynamics community marketing. That's why the site is as yet unnamed, with Microsoft encouraging the community to vote on what to call itself. Users also have the option to rate content within the community. So, far the name "Net Knowledge" is proving the most popular, trailed by "Finance Forum" and "Capital Chat." In about a month, Microsoft will go live with further networking capability on the site so that users can create working groups within the community, which are either open to everyone or private where participants receive invitations to join, Dewar said. He sees the upcoming functionality as a good opportunity for user groups to establish themselves in the online community.
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Microsoft&#160;is developing a common code base for all of itsDynamics ERP&#160;(enterprise resource planning) applications, a company executive said Wednesday.That will allow Microsoft to release new versions of the software more quickly, and make it easier for customers to switch from one application to another, according to Kirill Tatarinov, vice president of Microsoft Business Solutions.The division handles the&#160;Dynamics line of products, which includes ERP applications such as GP (formerly Great Plains), SL (formerly Solomon), AX (formerly Axapta), and NAV (formerly Navision), as well as the company&#39;s CRM applications.Microsoft&#39;s ERP products came from a spate of acquisitions earlier in the decade when it decided to enter the business applications market. The original plan was to merge the ERP lines into a single product, but Microsoft later decided against it.However, &quot;we never stopped working on convergence,&quot; Tatarinov said. &quot;That&#39;s been our strategy. That remains our strategy.&quot;Having one code base will allow applications to share the same user interface and controls, such as now are shared between AX and NAV, Tatarinov said. The code base will also encompass database functions, APIs (application programming interfaces), business intelligence capabilities and communications technologies that enable VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) and instant messaging, he said.Microsoft learned a &quot;tremendous&quot; amount about ERP after buying Great Plains Software in 2001 and Navision in 2002, Tatarinov said. Users won&#39;t ever see a single Microsoft ERP product for all markets, since Microsoft realizes that business have different needs, he said.However, users at Microsoft&#39;s Convergence 2007 expressed some confusion over the different product lines.&quot;I don&#39;t understand why they have so many different products,&quot; said Lars Jalve, financial manager for Transas Ltd., a company that makes navigation equipment for ships and managing harbors.Transas uses the NAV product, but Jalve suggested it might be easier for customers if Microsoft had just one ERP product and then offered modules with different functions that customers could purchase separately according to their needs. A product such as AX, which is aimed at large enterprises, might have functions that would appeal to people who are on ERP packages aimed at mid-size businesses, he said.Hans Grappi, leader of project management for a waste disposal company in Switzerland, was shopping for an ERP system to install in five disposal plants that have recently become part of the company. So far they&#39;ve installed SharePoint, Microsoft content management system, and have a very dated version of the AX ERP application.Grappi said is company is interested in what Microsoft has to offer, but the product set is too broad. &quot;You can get lost in all of the different elements,&quot; he said.&#160;
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Microsoft Corp. plans to unveil new versions of its Dynamics GP and SL ERP software that improve integration with Office applications and SharePoint Server tools.
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Targeted mainly at its VAR (Value Added Reseller) channel, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Version 4.0 was released to manufacturing this week.Version 4.0, code-named Titan, will be available in several versions: an on-premises application, a partner or VAR-hosted version plus a version of Dynamics hosted by Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live, the Microsoft-hosted deployment.All versions will share a single code base and the hosted versions use a multi-tenant architecture.Addressing its new upgrade message to its VAR channel, Microsoft officials said Version 4.0 includes an upgraded version of multi-tenant that will support multiple customers per server.Other upgrades include a choice of 25 languages and support for multiple currencies and embedded BI capabilities, including an ad hoc reporting wizard that will allow nontechnical users to create custom reports.Version 4.0 will also integrate with Microsoft?s unified communications platform, Microsoft Office Communications Server, along with its presence and location features.Although Microsoft will offer to host a version on its Live platform, the channel is the backbone of its strategy, according to most industry analysts.Josh Greenbaum, principal analyst at Enterprise Applications Consulting said that the Microsoft channel is so strong in the SMB market that it is the envy of all the other software vendors.?Everyone is trying to steal Microsoft channel partners. If you are an enterprise ISV there is no better and more mature channel than Microsoft,? Greenbaum said.Microsoft and Novell have the two oldest legacy channels in the industry, and Greenbaum called them, ?the nuts and bolts wizards.?In a prepared statement, Microsoft said it relies on its strong network of partner companies to bring technology to customers in the SMB marketplace, claiming over 400,000 partners.Dynamics CRM 4.0 is expected to be available in the first quarter.
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Business Ready Customer Care plan includes a major support upgrade and new financing for the Dynamics applications.
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Microsoft's  founder is expected to detail the company's plan for computer management software and announce a long-awaited Windows update tool.
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US software giant Microsoft Corporation has expanded a program giving government organizations access to some of its tightly guarded software blueprints.
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Microsoft has rolled out an update to its CRM&#160;suite in eight of 25 languages that the software will eventually support.
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Taking a page from major enterprise software providers like Oracle and SAP, Microsoft announced this week Business Ready Customer Care, an initiative that includes major enhancements to its maintenance and support program for Microsoft Dynamics, ERP and CRM, applications.The customer support initiative does three things: Extends for five years the time over which Microsoft will support its products; offers more creative financing solutions for buying its CRM and ERP products, and promises to create a more transparent environment for its channel partners and their customers about future upgrades and products.Industry analyst Josh Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting, said the fact that Microsoft is offering an additional five years of software support is in recognition of how well Oracle's extended support program is working for its customer base.Under the new Microsoft program there will be a total of five years of "mainstream" support for its products plus an additional five years of extended support, according to Christine Bell, director of global services product management, for Microsoft Business Solutions.Greenbaum says the extended support is a smart move on Microsoft's part."Oracle found out that extending support for their applications does not mean customers are gong to stall on [buying] new releases. They [Oracle] have a good upgrade flow despite or maybe because of extended support," Greenbaum said.In today's market, most vendors make upgrades a revenue-neutral event."You still get maintenance revenue either way, so why cause anxiety when you don't have to," added Greenbaum.On the financing side, Microsoft is now offering more options, including financing both the cost of hardware and software.Also available through March 2008 is a program called Smart Pay which will allow customers to select what their monthly payments will be for the first year.Finally, Bell said that Microsoft is making the commitment to deliver statements of directions that look out to the next 12 to 14 months."It will be very specific and talk about features and functionality," said Bell.Microsoft will include written documents on a special partner and customer Web site and will not require signing a non-disclosure agreement.The roadmap details are expected to start in November.
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Microsoft will expand its Office product lineup next year with a bundle designed to help small businesses manage customer, financial and business processes.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp. hopes to boost the adoption of BPM (business process management) applications by adding support for Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) in the workflow layer of Windows Vista, the company said Monday. It also has formed an alliance of software vendors aimed at making BPEL a more mainstream technology. Microsoft plans to add support for BPEL in Vista's Workflow Foundation (WWF) through a March community technology preview called BPEL for WWF March CP. That CTP will implement the BPEL 1.1 specification currently available from the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), which oversees the standard. However, the final release of BPEL for WWF will implement BPEL 2.0 and should be released in the last quarter of the year, Microsoft said. OASIS has approved the BPEL 2.0 specification but is still preparing it for final release, according to its Web site. Microsoft and IBM combined two competing business process programming languages to form BPEL for Web Services, later shortened to BPEL, several years ago. In April 2003 those companies along with other vendors submitted BPEL to OASIS as a standard. In addition to adding support for BPEL into Windows, Microsoft also on Monday said it formed the Business Process Alliance, a group of companies that plans to help customers build BPM applications on Microsoft's software platform. Along with Microsoft, the companies that have joined the alliance are AmberPoint Inc., Ascentn Corp., IDS Scheer AG, Fair Isaac Corp., Global360, InRule Technology Inc., Metastorm Inc., PNMsoft Ltd., RuleBurst Ltd. and SourceCode Technology Holdings Inc. According to Microsoft, the adoption of BPM technology has been limited to only the largest Fortune 500 companies. The company hopes to change that by adding BPEL to Windows and recruiting independent software vendors to build technology on its platform. BPEL has not developed without criticism, however. BPEL is an executable language that orchestrates how business processes interact, and some feel that a language based on what developers call choreography is a better option. Orchestration controls events in a process centrally, while choreography sets up prearranged rules for those events, which some argue is more flexible for developers. Microsoft also supports BPEL in its BizTalk Server integration software.
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Software giant introduces first in a series of online communities for its Dynamics apps users.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft hopes to better meet the back-office needs of smaller businesses with a new take on enterprise resource planning (ERP) software called Dynamics Entrepreneur Solution. The software will provide smaller organizations with finance, purchasing, and sales and marketing software. It's aimed at companies employing up to 49 staff and tops out at five concurrent users, according to Barb Edson, director, Microsoft Dynamics. Along with other ERP companies, Microsoft is looking for ways to attract startups that are starting to outgrow entry-level accountancy software like Intuit's QuickBooks and are in search of more sophisticated applications on which to run their businesses. Based on Microsoft's existing Dynamics NAV ERP applications, Entrepreneur can be seen as a stepping stone to the full-blown Dynamics NAV as a company expands its business. Microsoft said that Entrepreneur itself was more than just a scaled-down version of Dynamics NAV and had been specially developed for small businesses, particularly in terms of cutting back on the need for users to heavily customize the software. Priced at â¬795 ($1,086), Entrepreneur is set to make its debut in Europe as part of a phased worldwide rollout of the software. The product will initially be available in September in Germany, The Netherlands, Spain, and the U.K., Microsoft announced Tuesday at its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Denver. As with Microsoft's other back-office applications, the software will be provided by the vendor's partners. Microsoft also announced new software to make another one of its ERP families of products, Dynamics AX, accessible from mobile devices. Costing $495 per client access license, Dynamics AX Mobile Sales software is shipping this month. The product enables salespeople to remotely place and track orders, query sales histories and manage advertising campaigns from their Windows Mobile-based devices. The software includes Microsoft Dynamics Mobile Development Tools, which customers and partners can use to build additional mobile offerings based on Dynamics. At the same time, Microsoft announced an intensification of its existing relationship with Motorola Inc. to allow their joint partners to create Dynamics-based applications for some Motorola mobile computers. Adding mobile extensions to Dynamics AX is just the start, Edson said. The overall plan is to also extend Microsoft's other Dynamics ERP families so that those families of applications can be accessed by mobile devices. As yet the company is not commenting publicly on when such capabilities will become available for Dynamics GP, NAV and SL, she added. The software giant also made a number of other Dynamics announcements at the WPC event, notably releasing initial pricing,Â product and rollout details for its Dynamics Live CRM service. Microsoft also pledged to invest $20 million in initiatives over the coming year to act as inducements to its Dynamics partners. The programs include investments in training and education for technical sales staff and new hires at Microsoft partners along with financial rewards for partners completing a process to certify their add-on applications for Dynamics ERP or customer relationship management (CRM) software. Â