Microsoft bought four products from the mid and upper market ERP space: Great Plains, Solomon, Navision, and Axapta. Since then, the products have been renamed to Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics SL, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, and Microsoft Dynamics AX. Most people remember that about three years ago, Microsoft also announced "Project Green." The idea was that--eventually--there would be a single product that combined the features of all of these products. Originally, it was to be available sometime around the 2007/2008 timeframe, as I recall (could be wrong on that one, though).
That's been three years or so ago. And even then, the industry experts in-the-know doubted that it could be done in the timeframe that Microsoft envisioned. Today, the word has been out for 2-3 years that Green won't appear until at least 2011.
But, with the preliminary information available on version 5.0 and 5.1 of Dynamics NAV, the strategy seems to be coming into focus. The key is to preserve the existing product investment in functionality while at the same time migrating to an environment in which all of these features can play together in the same sandbox.
The sandbox, as many of us anticipated is IIS, with SharePoint sitting on top of it.
And--I have to say--the preliminary versions look pretty good. Keep tuned for more information about role-based user interfaces, and new features as well as the progress toward the end result.
