Microsoft Previews Its ERP Product

Microsoft (News - Alert) is previewing its Dynamics AX 4.0, the company's offering for providing what officials describe as "next-generation business value to customers in the form of powerful role-based activity."

As a composite application, Microsoft Dynamics AX is engineered to enable the use of business logic and data from multiple systems to show a complete view of a customer's business processes, "keeping the focus on people and the work they need to do," company officials say.

Mark A. Jensen, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics AX for the Microsoft Business Products Group at Microsoft says the product's "extraordinary level of integration with Microsoft SQL Server," among other considerations, "will deliver a product that challenges the competitors by providing a true role-based composite application."

Microsoft Dynamics AX, formerly Microsoft Business Products-Axapta, is a multi-language, multi-currency enterprise resource planning (ERP) product marketed as addressing "intricate business scenarios involving complex collaboration within and across companies." Company officials say its core strengths are in manufacturing, supply chain management, wholesale and distribution, retail, government, and services industries.

Last week Basis Technology announced the completion of a Unicode-enabled version of Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0 to support a wide variety of European and Asian languages, including German, Russian, Czech, and Simplified Chinese.

Microsoft Dynamics AX has user interfaces in a wide variety of languages, and fully supports multilingual data in a single database.

Microsoft Dynamics partnered with Basis Technology to audit, implement and Unicode enable Microsoft Dynamics AX, to handle multiple character sets in a single environment. The project included completely reengineering the software for Unicode and implementing the GB18030 character set required by China.

In addition, Basis wrote a database upgrade tool which reads a Microsoft Dynamics AX 3.0 database and converts all the non-Unicode data to Unicode to work with Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0.

Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0, available later this year, will allow customers to expand into global markets such as Japan and China, company officials say.

Greg Lush, CIO of The Linc Group Inc., says that while "acquisitions have created an environment with many systems," including Oracle (News - Alert)-, PeopleSoft- and UNIX-based environments, "Microsoft can provide the entire platform with business applications, infrastructure and support.

The software giant from Redmond, Washington has recently admitted it won't have its new Windows operating system ready for the end of the year as it had been planning.

David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page.

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