By Chris Alliegro [bio]
Posted: Jul. 24, 2006

The following is a sidebar accompanying an article published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. More samples of our content, as well as a list of upcoming articles and reports are also available.

Two "waves" of Dynamics ERP releases will bring greater consistency across the products' user interfaces (UIs), programming interfaces, and use of Microsoft technology. The first wave of releases spans 2005 to 2007 and includes AX 4.0 (which shipped in June 2006), GP 9.0 (Dec. 2005) and GP 10.0 (planned for 2007), NAV 5.0 (planned for midyear 2007), and SL 7.0 (planned for 2007). The second wave will run from 2008 to at least 2009 and will bring one or more additional releases to each of AX, GP, NAL, and SL.

Benefits

Although not yet complete, Wave One has helped Microsoft improve research and development efficiency and, at some level, lays a foundation for future product consolidation. Benefits to Microsoft, its customers, and partners include the following:

User interface consistency and usability. Wave One Dynamics products share a common UI look and feel modeled on Outlook and use a set of common UI controls, which eliminates some redundant development effort within MBS. In addition, the new UI should benefit customers in several ways—for one, the new Outlook-style navigation model is easier to learn and use. Furthermore, a common UI should make it easier for users of the various ERP products to eventually transition to the consolidated product, since the UI of that new product will presumably be similar (or identical) to that of the older family of products.

Modern portal foundation. The release of AX 4.0 means that all four Dynamics ERP products now use Microsoft's strategic portal technology—Windows SharePoint Services (WSS)—which relieves the MBS development team of working with obsolete technologies, such as Microsoft's Digital Dashboard Resource Kit. WSS-based portals are also easier for partners to work with. For example, developers can create or customize portal sites and pages using common Microsoft Web authoring tools (such as FrontPage) rather than the more complex and less familiar development tools required by other portal technologies.

Easier customization. The Web services programming interfaces released in Wave One make it easier for programmers to customize, extend, and integrate the products using languages and development tools of their choice, such as the .NET Framework and languages and the Visual Studio development environment. Providing such interfaces for the Dynamics line is increasingly important as Microsoft and other vendors standardize on Web services for application interoperability, and could help the company attract a larger cross-section of ISV developers to Dynamics products. Furthermore, according to Microsoft, developers that customize Dynamics products using the .NET Framework and the new programming interfaces will have less difficulty making their applications work with the consolidated product when it appears.

Caveats

Some caveats are worth noting:

Different implementation. Because the Dynamics ERP products are fundamentally different, the common guidelines were implemented in largely different ways. For example, even though releases share a common UI design and some building blocks (such as controls), each product ships its own distinct client and implements other major UI operations, such as rendering of forms, in product-specific ways (none of the products use recent Microsoft UI libraries, such as Windows Forms, for instance). While the company has reduced redundant efforts by sharing UI components, considerable additional development effort is required to create the client for each product.

Limited Reporting Services support. Although most of the Dynamics ERP products now work with Reporting Services at some level, they have not yet replaced or eliminated their native reporting engines. For example, although GP 9.0 users can access Reporting Services reports from the GP client, the product's several hundred canned reports are still based on Report Writer, GP's proprietary report-authoring and storage engine. Similarly, AX 4.0 introduced support for Reporting Services, but the product's main reporting mechanism is the proprietary reporting engine of previous versions, and very few of AX's hundreds of canned reports can be viewed using Reporting Services client tools.

Web services, .NET programmability limited. Wave One has made it easier for developers to customize and extend the Dynamics ERP products using Web services technology and Microsoft's Visual Studio tools and languages. However, limits exist: for example, the Dynamics Web services programming interfaces are not as complete as their legacy counterparts. Consequently, developers will likely continue to find some development tasks cumbersome with Visual Studio, and most custom application development will still require some use of the products' proprietary tools and languages.