Microsoft is pushing out a series of enhancements to its
business applications that will boost collaboration and integration
capabilities among employees, customers and partners.
This week at the Convergence 2003 customer conference, the
company's business solutions unit announced a portal interface for
its products and showcased upcoming technologies that will be part
of its Microsoft Business Network web services-based collaboration
framework. Other executives detailed improvements coming to the
company's customer relationship management applications and FRx
financial software.
Microsoft said the portal will be able to collapse multiple
screens into one browser-based interface and will be able to be
configured for specific roles. End users will have direct access to
applications, data and business processes through secure central
log-on, said Mark Jensen, group product manager of new
solutions.
Microsoft will roll out a human resources self-service suite
that will allow company employees to log on and get information
about their salaries and enter time and attendance information. The
suite will ship in June.
As part of the Microsoft Business Network collaboration
initiative, the company is also planning to release a beta service
suite next month that will enable partners to exchange documents in
electronic data interchange (EDI) format via XML standards.
The goal is to help cut costs for small and medium-sized
companies that need to standardise their transaction formats.
Microsoft also plans to add broker technology to the Business
Network offering, said Marcus Schmidt, lead product manager at the
business solutions division.
Several users expressed interest in the portal. Bill
Siemerling, chief information officer at US health care provider
Healthforce Partners, said that his company for the past couple of
weeks has been beta testing the business portal as an intercompany
communications and collaboration tool.
Healthforce, which already uses Microsoft's Great Plains
financial and accounting software, is now using the portal as a
central place to deliver company news and let users access
resources based on their work on a particular project or their role
in the company.
Siemerling said the portal is tightly integrated with the Great
Plains software.
Catalogue services company Fingerhut Direct Marketing currently
runs its own homegrown portal that connects to back-end Great
Plains enterprise resource planning (ERP) software running off a
single Microsoft SQL database.
Chief information officer, Fred Argir said he would be willing
to consider moving to the business portal because it would probably
have greater built-in efficiencies. The Business Network services
suite would be especially useful at Fingerhut, which does a lot of
trading with partners using EDI.
Gibson Musical Instruments has been beta-testing the portal with
about dozen users for the past five weeks and is considering using
it as a general corporate portal.
Gibson also runs Great Plains ERP software. However, chief
knowledge officer Matt Mullins said he would like Microsoft to
offer vertical applications specific to his industry and
for Microsoft to roll out an integrated point-of-sale system in the
suite.