Making Green PalatableMaking Green Palatable

Microsoft Business Solutions will try to recast its Project Green vision as a user-friendly, incremental migration to next-generation ERP applications.

Doug Burgum, senior vice president of MBS, will detail the plans this week at the Convergence 2005 event in San Diego. Project Green, the company's grand plan to move features now found in four different ERP code bases to a single unified foundation, will surface incrementally in updates to its current Axapta, Great Plains, Navision and Solomon product lines, Microsoft executives said.

The company has defined 50 core user "roles" in target midmarket companies, as well as a set of process hierarchies that it will build into its lineup over time, said James Utzschneider, general manager of strategy of Microsoft's Small and Medium Solutions and Partners group. The goal is to provide a role-based view to the user of underlying processes and data.

Fruits of this effort should start rolling out this fall with Great Plains 8.5, then next year in Axapta 4.0, and then gel in the Office 12/Longhorn client time frame, or "2006-ish," Utzschneider said.

For key business processes, Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft will cherry-pick from among its current products. Great Plains, for example, has the strongest financials so that line will be the basis for financial process hierarchy.

Manufacturing expertise will be lifted from Axapta, distribution know-how from Navision, and project accounting processes from Solomon, said Lynne Stockstad, general manager of marketing strategy at MBS.

Another important phase of Project Green is integrating Axapta and Navision into SharePoint Portal Server so that VARs can use common Webparts across the whole ERP spectrum, Utzschneider said.

This is a much more evolutionary model than most Microsoft watchers construed the old Project Green to be. It was unclear to some solution providers how this effort, which starts at the user and works back into the innards of the system, will lead to the promised unified code base.

"It's ironic that Microsoft appears to be backpedaling at a time when Oracle appears to be getting it all together with its Project Fusion [a melding of the best of Oracle and PeopleSoft apps]," said one longtime partner.

Another partner disagreed. "There is an ability to create portal and .Net apps across functions so that core modules can be replaced over time and you get to pretty much what they promised," said John Hendrickson, CEO of Interdyn MicroVar, a solution provider in St. Paul, Minn.