Project Green Details Trickle Out

In keynote speeches delivered by Chief Software Architect Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer at the Sept. 2005 Microsoft Business Summit, Microsoft demonstrated how future Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) releases would use the Windows Workflow Foundation, a workflow platform that will be built into the “Longhorn” revision of Windows Server. The speeches also reiterated previously disclosed themes guiding Project Green, the long-term plan to consolidate the company’s line-of-business and customer relationship management (CRM) products on a single code base. However, the keynotes did not indicate when product consolidation would be complete.

Change in Waves

In Mar. 2005, at the company’s annual Convergence conference, Microsoft indicated it would release incremental updates to each of its four enterprise resource planning (ERP) products and the Microsoft CRM product through 2007, and dubbed these incremental updates “Project Green Wave One.” A second wave of Project Green releases will follow the next major version of Windows Server, code-named Longhorn Server, and will begin to consolidate the individual products’ code bases into a single code base.