Microsoft News Tracker

Microsoft yesterday announced the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 with a large laundry list of enhancements.

Dynamics AX (formerly Axapta) is one of Microsoft’s poorly delineated family of mid-market enterprise resource planning products that were obtained by acquisition and then left to snooze profitlessly in Microsoft Business Solutions. Microsoft had high hopes for mashing together all the odds and ends in MBS under the Dynamics brand and sharing a combined underlying framework called "Project Green," but the bloom was soon off the latter rose and only the brand remains. Still, Dynamics AX might be viewed as a triumph of sorts:

AX 9000 also represents the start of Microsoft’s new strategy of CRM software "harmonization," adopted after the failure of Microsoft’s Project Green, an initiative to move components from its various CRM products to a single Web services-based environment.

Instead, Microsoft now plans to "harmonize" its CRM offerings through increased adoption of SQL Server and the .NET Framework across AX and its other CRM product line-ups: Dynamics GP, NAV, and SL.

So the developers continue to beaver on supporting their existing customers and perhaps bagging a new one here and there, but the financial results, if they are in fact positive, are buried by Office with which Dynamics shares the Microsoft’s Business Division.

Hitting another end of year milestone Microsoft today announced the RTM of two flavors of Microsoft Dynamics CRM:

The new version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, formerly code-named “Titan,” has been completed and released to manufacturing, Microsoft Corp. announced today. The new version is offered under two product names: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 for on-premise and partner-hosted deployments and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live for Microsoft-hosted deployment. Designed with a single unified-code base for both on-premise and on-demand deployments, Microsoft Dynamics CRM enables customers to choose the right deployment model for their specific business and IT needs, with the flexibility to change deployment models over time if their needs or preferences change.
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Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 will be available worldwide in more than 25 languages. The English language pack will be available within the next seven days to new and existing partners and customers. Nine additional language packs will be available in January and the remaining language packs will be delivered at a rate of four or more each month.
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The new Microsoft Dynamics Live CRM service is offered only in the United States and Canada, and is currently available to a limited number of customers via the Early Access program.

Despite the RTM, the hosted CRM Live offering seems to be in the same twilight state it was in July, but that will be cold comfort for the Microsoft partners who bought into hosting Dynamics CRM 3.0 for customers, only to have Microsoft blow them out of the water with their own hosting service.

Microsoft released version 5.0 of their Dynamics NAV enterprise resource planning (ERP) offering in March of this year and had promised an improved version 5.1 in 1H2008 (delayed from 4Q2007), but that plan has gone off the rails too.  Now the story is that Dynamics NAV 5.1 will be folded into version 6.0 and scheduled for 2H2008 according to Darren Laybourn at the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Team Blog.

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Late last week, Microsoft announced that Kirill Tatarinov has been selected as the new head of the troubled Microsoft Business Solutions group that produces a variety of software for small and medium businesses under the Dynamics brand.

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As promised back in March, Microsoft today announced the release of Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 (formerly Great Plains) and Microsoft Dynamics SL 7.0 (formerly Solomon). GP is a full featured accounting package and SL is an enterprise resource planning software system and both are targeted at medium sized businesses as part of Microsoft’s historically sluggish Dynamics family. New features are “increased business intelligence functionality, a more intuitive user interface and the introduction of structured and unstructured search.”