Microsoft Ships Sell-Side Software SuiteMicrosoft Ships Sell-Side Software Suite

One tenet of Microsoft's corporate-software strategy in the upcoming year will be to sell companies bundles of E-business servers and platform software to address specific needs. Microsoft calls the program "solutions," and it's betting the tactic will result in higher customer satisfaction than efforts to sell and support many products individually.

On Tuesday, Microsoft delivered its third solutions package, called the Microsoft Solution for Supplier Enablement. The package, available through systems integrators and commercial resellers, bundles BizTalk Server 2000, Commerce Server 2000, and SQL Server 2000, with an XML-transformation module that lets those products talk to procurement software from Ariba, Clarus, and Commerce One. That's accomplished through BizTalk Accelerator software that transforms those vendors' XML schema into the XML schema supported by Commerce Server.

The BizTalk package, aimed at companies selling goods online, complements BizTalk Accelerators for the IT and health-care industries that are already on the market.

In a recent interview, Microsoft senior VP Paul Flessner said the company plans to release a new version of BizTalk Server within the next six months. The new version will likely include a feature that could ease the product's administration. Flessner says users of the next version will be able to send trading partners "seeds"--URLs which point to scripts used to set up BizTalk's functions.