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Microsoft rebrands its business solutions software
April 2006From March 2006 Microsoft Business Solutions® – Navision® has been officially branded as Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV. This rebrand forms part of the staged migration from a set of discrete products under the Microsoft Business Solutions® banner to an integrated business management solution under the Microsoft Dynamics™ brand. Microsoft entered the ‘business solutions’ market in April 2001, when it acquired Great Plains Software Inc in the US, then a leading supplier of ‘mid-market ERP solutions’, and formed the Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) group. In July 2002 this acquisition was complemented by the purchase of Navision a/s, the leading ERP supplier in Europe. With these purchases Microsoft inherited an impressive array of business software applications, each with large user bases, and a set of established distribution channels through richly experienced business solutions partners. From 2002 right up to the present day, Microsoft has continued to support and further develop each of the four enterprise resource planning solutions in its product portfolio. In 2006 all of these products and Microsoft CRM were brought under the Microsoft Dynamics™ branding. Cambridge Online has a long association with Navision, its first implementation having been delivered successfully in 1996. More recently, it has included Microsoft CRM in its service offering. Cambridge Online is committed to supporting both of these products for the long term. As part of the rebranding process, references to Navision and Microsoft CRM in Cambridge Online literature will be phased out over time and replaced with the new product brand names.
The brand migration of these products is ‘Wave 1’ of the Dynamics roadmap, the plan to ultimately converge all of Microsoft’s ERP solutions into one application. Under Wave 1 the user interfaces across the full Microsoft Dynamics™ portfolio will be given a facelift, with the aims of providing a ‘role based’ user experience with ‘deep integration’ to Microsoft Office and aligning product functionality across the ERP portfolio. Behind the scenes all of these products will be SQL Server enabled, meaning that there will be a common platform for the underlying data regardless of which ‘front end’ any particular customer is using. In addition, a common set of portal, collaboration and web service tools are being introduced that are designed to integrate and interact seamlessly with the rest of the Microsoft ‘stack’. Wave 2 of the Dynamics product convergence in scheduled for 2008 and onwards. Again, new releases of all of Microsoft’s major ERP solutions are planned and these will see further integration with the introduction of common modular processes and process libraries across the range, an enhanced set of .NET tools and a further improved user experience. Tami Reller, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Business Solutions Group, said, when launching the rebranding project in September of last year: ‘This iterative approach for introducing Microsoft Dynamics™ into the installed base is what customers are looking for: a staged migration that preserves their existing investments while receiving the benefits from Microsoft’s significant investments in research and development’.Cambridge Online has been delivering high quality business management solutions with the Navision product for over a decade, even before Microsoft bought into the product. Cambridge Online will manage the process of migration to the new version as part and parcel of business as usual, according to the upgrade path already agreed with each customer. Any customers that would like to review their product support contracts to ensure that they are enjoying the benefits of the new releases should contact their account manager now, if they have not already done so. You can contact the Cambridge Online Account Management team via email. The current version of Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV is Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV 4.0, which was released in Q4 2004 as Microsoft® Business Solutions-Navision® 4.0. Relevant Links Microsoft Press Release: Microsoft Introduces Microsoft Dynamics™ Brand Microsoft Dynamics™: Introducing Microsoft Dynamics
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