MBS Solutions and Partner Opportunity

It was great to be at Tech Ed earlier this week and meet up with customers, partners and ISVs. The technical architecture of everything we do is driven by our vision and goal of delivering “Affordable Adaptability”. Getting feedback from implementers and ISVs who are extending, embedding and integrating our application platform as they build solutions for specific business/customer contexts is always very insightful.

This was the first major show at which we showcased our new Small Business product – Office Small Business Accounting 2006 (SBA). We demoed the seamless integration of Outlook Business Contact Manger (BCM), SBA and online services (Payroll from ADP, Banking, Marketing, Sales Leads). We also provided details on the hooks of we provide for writing custom reports (through Access), extending SBA using managed APIs and integrating and also embedding SBA UI. You can order a trial copy of Office SBA at -

Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting - Trial Version .  I think SBA product provides a great new opportunity for all partners and ISVs trying to reach Small Business customers with specific add-on and vertical solutions. Even for VARs and ISVs focused on mid market and enterprise markets, you can look to extend SBA to reach small businesses that form part of the enterprise dealer and supplier networks and automate the flow of business documents/process integration in the network.

We showcased the new features and extensibility coming in the next release of CRM. We showed how a hypothetical Building Maintenance service provider can automate extend CRM using the new CRM create entity wizard to include “Buildings”, build out a Building Maintenance contract as a Word template that has its schema populated using the CRM entity meta data, build a Office Task Pane form in Visual Studio using the Office Information Worker Bridge Framework (IBF) and have the code behind this form call web services exposed both in CRM and also Great Plains. So an end user who wants to submit a Building Maintenance contract can simply bring up their Word template and go to the task pane retrieve the relevant information from both CRM and Great Plains and apply them to the contract and hit submit. This service request than gets serviced by the service agent who sees the entire contract details persisted in the CRM database. This demo showcases the power of extensibility architecture of both Business Solutions and also Office and what partners and customers can do to “bridge” the worlds of structured and un-structured data in the context of a custom business process. Some other vendors want you to pay extra for this and also wait for these solutions!! Our response to that is simple - why wait? why pay? – when you can do this today with MBS Solutions and do that for far less.

Additionally we showed the progress we are making in all our Green Wave 1 commitments. We showed how its simple to build a role based portal page in Sharepoint for Navision using web parts we ship and combining them with Office parts. The Navision Employee portal with support for Sharepoint ships in Navision 4.0 SP1.  We also showed the early code of Axapta 4.0 with its Web Service creation wizard that enabled the creation of a web service that exposed an Axapta query and subsequently had an Infopath form bind to this web service.  Lastly we showed how a vertical ISV can build extensions in .NET for both the Great Plains client and also server side where they extend a Great Plains web service. All of these demos reinforce the key points of Green wave 1 innovation – role based user experience, Share Point portal integration and Web Services support across all our products - and the partner opportunity this creates for everyone extending, embedding or integrating our solutions.