Microsoft business apps take on more roles

Will better meet needs of mid-market firms

Microsoft has announced plans for role-based templates for its business applications, to better meet the needs of mid-market firms, and said it will unify the products under a new Dynamics brand.

Microsoft CRM, Great Plains, Axapta, Navision and Solomon brands will be repackaged under the Dynamics name with suffixes CRM, GP, AX, NAV and SL. The move may help the software giant dispel perceptions that it has assembled a jumble of tools, and that its delayed Project Green plan to converge products is unviable.

The business applications will be fitted with 50 user-role templates tailored to job functions. Microsoft ERP group manager David Dennis said the system will "deliver information to people relative to their specific role in the organisation [with] in-context business intelligence that serves data to people in the context of their work".

The packages were gained through acquisitions, with the exception of CRM, and have so far struggled to carve more than a niche in UK businesses and satellite offices. However, Microsoft is investing heavily to change the way its back-end software works.

Dynamics products will share the Office look and feel and will tap other products such as SharePoint and SQL Server for dashboard analytics. Products will be released between now and early 2007 with gradual integration of user interface, portals and web services. Converged products are due in 2008.

Microsoft also said the next version of Windows Server will have an integrated management product, codenamed Centro, for simpler provision- ing at mid-market firms.

At this week's Professional Developers Conference, a new Windows Vista beta release is expected, and Office 12 and the WinFS next-generation file system are likely to be shown.

Computacenter recently said few firms want to evaluate Vista yet, but fellow systems integrator Conchango said the Avalon presentation layer is attracting interest and Avanade said it has customers running pre-release code.