Microsoft business applications customers will see the first concrete benefits from the company's long-anticipated Project Green initiative this fall when Microsoft begins to roll out new role-based user interfaces for its Great Plains, Axapta, Navision, CRM and Solomon application suites, officials said this week.
At a Microsoft-sponsored meeting of 500 partners and mid-size customers, which featured speeches by Chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer, the Redmond, WA software vendor disclosed it will begin rebranding its business applications under the Microsoft Dynamics moniker this fall.
With its next release this fall, for example, Great Plains will become Microsoft Dynamics GP and Microsoft CRM will be called Dynamics CRM. Next year, the Axapta suite will become Dynamics AX, Navision will be called Dynamics NAV and Solomon will be known as Dynamics SL.
Separately, Microsoft announced availability of Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting 2006 and Microsoft Business Management Edition 2006, two accounting, sales and marketing tools for small business that are built on the Microsoft Office suite of personal productivity applications.
Microsoft also revealed intentions to market a version of its next-generation Longhorn server platform specifically tailored for mid-sized businesses with between 50 and 1,000 employees. The new server for mid-sized businesses, code-named Centro, will be based on the next-generation version of Microsoft's Exchange Server -- Exchange 12 -- as well as the Longhorn technology and is expected to be available in 18 months.
The collection of product initiatives, said James Utzschneider, general manager for Small and Midmarket Solutions and Partners at Microsoft, is intended to improve the company's ability to deliver easy-to-manage solutions to smaller businesses.
"The mid-market is underserved by the IT industry," said Utzschneider. "In many cases, these companies are too big to go off and buy software at retail because they have many of the same challenges that larger enterprises have. But they don't have big IT budgets and staffs that larger enterprises have. Generally, we don't do a good job of engaging with these customers or explaining to them how we will help move them forward."
The role-based user interfaces that Microsoft is planning for its business applications will ease end-user training burdens faced by mid-sized companies by making systems easier to use, Utzschneider said. As part of its Project Green initiative -- announced about two years ago following its acquisition of Navision -- Microsoft has been studying roles and business processes commonly engaged in by users of its business applications. Microsoft has identified 50 core roles -- such as sales manager, HR manager, accounts payable manager -- filled by users of its applications.
The role-based user interfaces planned for Microsoft's business applications, said Utzschneider, will be tailored to each of those 50 user types, incorporating business processes and resources commonly used by those individuals.
The role-based user interfaces also will tightly integrate with various Microsoft productivity applications. Users in sales positions, for example, would see a role-based user interface built on top of Microsoft's Outlook system, while users in a plant floor management role would see an interface built around Microsoft's Excel data analysis tool.
Disclosure of the role-based UI initiative is a positive step for Microsoft's business applications initiative, which has struggled to stem losses, and a welcome example of the benefits Project Green will bring to customers, said Laurie McCabe, vice president at AMI Partners Inc. (New York) an SMB market analyst firm.
In the past, Microsoft officials have often described Project Green as a push to consolidate Microsoft's business applications into a single, common code base, a prospect that has concerned some customers who fear losing support for their current business applications, said McCabe.
The role-based user interface initiative, however, shows that Project Green's impact will be gradual and measured and will deliver significant benefits along its path toward consolidation of Microsoft's business application product lines.
"Customers can start to see how Project Green is being implemented, and that should ease some of the fears," said McCabe.
McCabe, however, noted that Microsoft is not the only vendor of business applications targeting mid-market companies with easier-to-use systems. Other vendors such as SAP and NetSuite are moving in the same direction, she said. "Microsoft has to act quickly if they're going to build the kind of momentum that they want in the mid-market," she said.