Office Small Business Accounting & Microsoft Dynamics
It has been a couple of months since I have posted – a very busy summer culminating with a very exciting day today, September 7.
We have two major annoucements. Small Business product - Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting 2006 (SBA) - goes to customers. And today is an important marker for us in terms of delivering "Green" Wave 1 innovations - role specific user experience, Portal technology built on WSS, integrated Business Intelligence, and Web Services across all our ERP and CRM product lines. Coincident with Business Summit, we are unveiling the name of "Green" – Microsoft Dynamics. We will be shipping versions of Microsoft Dynamics starting this Fall.
It is exciting to see how the fall release of Microsoft Dynamics GP (formerly know as Great Plains 9.0 J) will have over 20 roles for which there will be pre-configured home pages containing pertinent tasks, mail and calendar, key reports, metrics and KPIs, and links to specific application areas. The notion of roles based software extends to those roles also who do not necessarily are not bound to a PC on their desk for their work. Take for example a warehouse worker who needs to manually scan items during pick, pack, and ship. Hands free warehouse is automating the entire pick pack and ship through the use of RFID tags and readers and integrating them into the supply chain execution workflow in Axapta (I mean Microsoft Dynamics AX!!). This is giving a tremendous boost to productivity of warehouse workers while reducing the order handing errors. There are many personas that work in field servicing customers, or taking orders etc. A handheld device to quickly take orders, note deliveries, or record service time (with on-line update of ERP system) is much more suitable for these roles. Our supply chain R&D team in Copenhagen is running customer pilots to support field sales and delivery roles through mobile devices.
Additionally, we are incorporating Windows Workflow Foundation in our applications to compose and execute business processes. This is a huge step in making it easy to deal with business process exceptions as they happen and make quick process changes to respond to new needs. We will showcase a lot of what we are doing with Windows Workflow Foundation and also Office 12 at PDC the week after Business Summit.
It was fun to go visit local stores last weekend and see all the merchandizing of Office Small Business Accounting 2006. SBA truly represents the next generation of business management software that provides natural simplicity to managing business processes at the same time not being simplistic. The delivery of “software services” through “smart clients” is unique in Office SBA. Partners such as ADP are taking advantage of this by exposing Payroll as service to SBA customers with in-situ user experience. The early feedback has been great; I would specifically be tracking the ease of use as we drive towards pervasive adoption and catalog of third party solutions that extend SBA both on the client and in the cloud.
One thing that I have my hands on is how we take advantage of simple, yet powerful community standards for data interchange such RSS to solve real hard business problems. The amazing simplicity of making business data available for consumption through RSS makes it possible to chain through business processes. Imagine how businesses could used to aggeregate sales leads from across your distribution channel or how you can use feeds across the supply chain to track information on movement of goods. These is inherently a complex problems with many point to point to custom integrations today. With RSS once can see a path where – a) data is being unshackled from application semantics and being made freely available on the internet; b) end user tools to consume and "re-mix" RSS feeds from multiple sources tames the complexity of business process coordination to something anyone can do. We are building in broad support for Web services and internet facing deployment in our applications to enable these scenarios and will be showcasing MS-CRM’s support for RSS feeds over the internet at Business Summit and also at the PDC. This is a first step in truly “democratizing” business data!!
Satya Nadella is corporate vice president responsible for leading the Product Group within Microsoft Business Solutions.
Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992 and has held a variety of marketing, product development and general management roles. Before taking on his current role, Nadella was responsible for launching and leading Microsoft bCentral, the leading Internet service providing Web presence, communications, customer marketing and e-commerce tools to small businesses. Nadella became part of Business Solutions when the division was formed by combining the bCentral, Great Plains and Navision a/s groups.
Before that, he was general manager for the Commerce Platforms Group and led the development efforts for Microsoft Commerce Server and Microsoft BizTalk Server. Nadella was also a key member of several advanced technology incubation efforts inside Microsoft, including interactive television (ITV) and digital rights management (DRM). Nadellas first assignment at Microsoft was in the Windows Developer Relations group, where he was a program manager.
Before joining Microsoft, Nadella was a member of the technology staff at Sun Microsystems Inc.
Nadella has a masters degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin and a masters degree in business administration from the University of Chicago.
