Business Solutions Roadmap 2004 Updated

Despite organizational restructuring and the outsourcing of Solomon development, Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) has delivered a number of incremental releases across its product line in 2004. However, other planned releases and feature enhancements, particularly in the group’s newer products, have been shelved or delayed. Schedule delays in mature products such as Axapta could prove an annoyance to existing customers, and delays in updates to newer products could directly impact adoption, since those updates tend to address limitations that have stifled sales.

ERP Releases Roughly on Track

Microsoft planned to update each of the core MBS enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in the second half of calendar year 2004. As it has done in the past, MBS will make available lower-priced Standard Editions of Great Plains, Navision, and Solomon when it releases those products’ full-featured editions (which are referred to simply as Great Plains, Navision, and Solomon).

Microsoft’s progress against those plans is as follows (for an illustration of the revised MBS ERP product roadmap, see “MBS ERP Roadmap at a Glance—Updated“):