“Democratizing” Business Logic and Data
This week Microsoft is hosting PDC05, our 11th Professional Developers Conference. While I am not able to go to Los Angeles, I am tracking the webcasts - a lot to learn from and use in our efforts across business applications.
I mentioned about incorporating Windows Workflow Foundation in Dynamics to compose and execute business processes. There are several ad hoc business workflows that are carried out outside of core applications and managed through paper trails, emails, and phone instructions, and creating data islands that keep diverging from the core systems. Some examples of such ad-hoc workflows are supplier and partner on-boarding, contract management, manufacturing outsourcing, RFP responses and proposals etc. If these processes and workflows can be formalized and flexibly implemented in tandem with the core systems, it is a huge advantage for the businesses as they can track, get visibility into, and gauge efficiency and bottlenecks of these processes. At the PDC we will be showcasing a scenario wherein the vendor on-boarding workflow is incorporated as part of Dynamics-Ax. Now with the help of Web Services that are exposed and WinWF we are able to compose and orchestrate this workflow from vendor filling the form through approval loop to final submission of the approved record into the business application data model without any information being lost or re-entered. The best part is that when the “workflow” needs to change the business analyst can change the WinWF “model” and the software “adapts”.
The other area of drilldown at PDC has to do with Office solutions that surround ERP & CRM applications. In many cases its more natural to do work in Office. For example the most natural place to write the sales proposal is in Microsoft Word. But you need to have details on product, their prices and also discounts in the letter. Many do this today by simply copying and pasting data from their transactional system. Then work gets done “out of band” from the business system – e.g. discount negotiation. None of this is tracked in the business application and the information in the proposal could gets stale quickly. Now with the support of web services in business applications and XML support in Office, its possible to build “mini” solutions like Proposal Generator, Contract Templates etc in Office that bind to business logic/data access exposed by business applications as web services. At the PDC we will show in-depth how we built a Proposal generator in Microsoft Word, using VSTO, that has all the information connect “live” to CRM data using the web services APIs.
We will also show a more enhanced version of CRM support for RSS at the PDC as well. We will be taking advantage of the RSS list extensions and also RSS store in Vista to surface very rich CRM feeds into IE7 and Outlook 12 with features such as sort and pivot enabled. So for example you can get a feed of the sales pipeline from your dealers and have the ability to sort by geography or amount. Again all this is possible because CRM exposes its advanced find capabilities as a web services that is used to generate the RSS feeds.
These are powerful examples of what ubiquitous support of web services and XML that we are building into our business applications can enable in terms of more adaptable workflow/business process automation and also more natural ways to consume and interact with 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.
