Thin Client

Microsoft Business Solutions unit and its partners are testing new Web-service add-ons to Microsoft's ERP and CRM applications by making code available under various Microsoft's Shared Source licenses.

Microsoft quietly has been posting these add-ons to workspaces on its GotDotNet source-code hosting site since last fall. Like the MSN business unit, Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) is testing out potential new products and code samples by sharing them via "Sandbox" test sites, company officials said.

The most recent Sandbox project, which MBS unveiled officially on February 20, is a family of "Snap Dynamics" tools that are designed to bridge Microsoft Office 2003 with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 and Dynamics/AX (formerly Axapta) ERP products. Microsoft is making the Snap code for these first Snap tools available under the Shared Source Permissive license. And more Shared Source Snap tools are in the pipeline, officials said.

The Permissive License, known as Ms-PL, is considered the least restrictive of Microsoft's Shared Source licenses, allowing individuals to "view, modify and redistribute the source code for either commercial or non-commercial purposes," according to the company.

"MBS has been leading the charge internally in using these licenses," said David Dennis, group manager of Microsoft's Dynamics/SL product line.

But there are other MBS projects incubating in the GotDotNet Sandboxes, too.

In December 2005, Microsoft posted to GotDotNet a mashup of Dynamics 3.0 and MapPoint, its online mapping service. Such a mashup could allow customers to customize the Dynamics CRM contact form to show a MapPoint map displaying a contact's address.

A month before that, MBS made available on GotDotNet for download the Dynamics/SL (formerly Solomon) Portal Lite. Business Portal Lite enables multiple browsers – Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Mozilla and others -- to be used as a thin-client interface connecting the Microsoft Business Solutions Business Portal and the Solomon ERP system. The portal provides users with time, expense approval, alerts and project profitability tracking and reviewing functionality.

There has been a "surprising adoption rate" since Microsoft launched these GotDotNet projects, Dennis said. More than 750 individuals have registered to view code and information in the member-only CRM Sandbox.And more than 110 have registered for the Dynamics/SL Sandbox.

"Mashing up Web services with on-premise applications is something we're evangelizing today," said James Utzschneider, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics marketing.

Utzschneider said this kind of mixing is how Microsoft will likely extend its CRM and ERP applications to make them part of the company's overall "Live" strategy. Just as Windows Live is a set of services extensions to Windows, and Office Live a set of services extensions to Office, Microsoft will be doing the same with its MBS applications, he said.

"Customizing the user interface so it's relevant to me" – with RSS feeds, alerts, MapPoint, and various mobile extensions is the name of the game, Utzschneider said. "Role-based composite applications are the moral equivalent of Web 2.0 for business applications."

Microsoft isn't expecting all of its MBS mashups and/or Live extensions to come from inside the company, however. In the Navision ERP world, many of Microsoft's partners had grown accustomed to sharing bits of code via public and partner newsgroups, noted Dennis.

"What we're doing now are natural extensions of what our partners had been doing all along," Dennis said.

Microsoft will be elaborating on its MBS Live/mashup strategy at the upcoming Microsoft Convergence conference for MBS customers and partners in Dallas in mid-March, company officials confirmed.

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