The changing face of Project Green

Looking ahead, financial services-based Dynamics GP and project-based Dynamics SL will retain their focus and will remain predominantly North American products, although Microsoft is making both of them available in Spanish for use in South America. For now, the global product focus is with Dynamics NAV, which can be rapidly configured, and Dynamics AX, which allows partners and customers to more deeply customize the software using Microsoft's Visual Studio development tools suite, he said. Each product family will also continue to have its own ecosystem of Microsoft partners who have built specific functionality on top of a particular Dynamics flavor.

When will Microsoft have a converged Dynamics product? How about June 7, 2013? That's when James Utzschneider, general manager of Dynamics marketing at Microsoft, will turn 50, he said. "That's as good a date as any," he said, adding that Microsoft will do two series of product releases prior to that date. The next major Dynamics releases will come in 2008 and 2009 and will be designed to coincide with the planned debut of the next version of Microsoft's desktop applications suite, codenamed Office 14.

"In 2012 or 2013, we'll reach a point where there's no difference between Dynamics," in terms of the user experience, Utzschneider said. "Customers will wind up using more and more code that's shared across different products."

Back when Microsoft first dreamed up Project Green, the vendor imagined "a bottom-up, object-oriented development" effort, Utzschneider said. But after talking to customers, the vendor realized what they wanted was a top-down approach to converging the Dynamics offerings in terms of a common look to all the applications and the same level of integration with other Microsoft software. The push toward a converged offering is coming from customers, he said. "They love the idea of having us take our existing products and creating a new, modern platform," he added.

"Project Green is important to my boss, he wants to know what the future is," said Tony Scallon, business systems analyst, IT department at Clearwater Seafoods Partnership in Bedford, Canada, which uses Dynamics GP. "When we first heard about Green, we said, 'You just aren't going to get there from here,'" he quipped. Scallon welcomes the way Microsoft has gradually changed the focus of Green over time and looks forward to functionality from different Dynamics offerings appearing in new releases of Dynamics GP.

One question users and partners frequently ask Utzschneider is whether a converged Dynamics will mean they can pick and choose different components from Dynamics AX, GP, NAV, and SL, marrying up, say, the fixed accounting in GP with the supply chain in AX. "We're not really planning on that with our existing model," he said. Such mixing and matching of components is technically hard to do since the Dynamics products remain different at the bottom or metal layer.

REFERENCES:
Microsoft releases BI tools for Dynamics CRM, Feb. 12, 2007