MBS Roadmap Beyond 2006

At Convergence 2005, Microsoft’s annual conference for Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) customers and partners, Microsoft Vice President Doug Burgum hinted at some directions and themes beyond the incremental releases planned through 2006, referring to these future plans as “Project Green Wave Two.” He suggested that future MBS releases would see increasing integration with Visual Studio and that these releases would make use of features found in Microsoft’s next major Windows upgrade (code-named Longhorn), such as the new WinFX APIs and the “Indigo” Web services protocols.

This proposed integration suggests that the proprietary development environments, languages, and designer tools of individual enterprise resource planning (ERP) products could eventually be hosted in Visual Studio, similar to what Microsoft has done with BizTalk 2004 and SQL Server 2005. Beyond such speculation, however, what Project Green Wave Two means for customers and partners in any practical sense remains unspecified. Furthermore, Microsoft has offered no information on what the future (beyond 2006) holds for the MBS products outside of its main ERP lines.