Microsoft Extends Business Solutions Suite

With the new, new "Project Green" under way, Microsoft Corp. is tapping its Windows SharePoint Services platform for additional functionality for its Microsoft Business Solutions suite.
The Redmond, Wash., company is building out functionality across its MBS product suite—which includes Great Plains, Axapta, Navision, Solomon and Microsoft CRM—that will enable users to leverage WSS' prebuilt business process applications as a starting point for integrating components and, in a lightweight fashion, enable users to build composite applications.
The WSS applications—Microsoft announced 30 of them earlier this month—are preconfigured business process templates that encompass movable Web parts that users are able to manipulate using the WSS portal.
WSS, based on Microsoft's .Net Framework, is complementary to Project Green in that it provides users with role-specific interfaces for tapping back-end application functionality.
For example, in Axapta 4.0, expected early next year, the Enterprise Portal platform will become WSS, enabling a SharePoint Web authoring environment, officials said. That environment provides integrated collaboration, common search, as well as enhanced content and document management and personalization capabilities. It also lets users integrate Axapta Web parts into SharePoint portals.