Microsoft Announces General Availability of Dynamics SL 2011

In the briefest of public statements, Microsoft marketing executive Errol Schoenfish today announced the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics SL 2011.  As promised in October 2010, the latest release of the project-focused ERP solution features a broad range of new enhancements aimed at supporting increased productivity, business value and insight across an organization.

Like other Dynamics ERP solutions, Dynamics SL 2011 includes more of the familiar Microsoft Outlook loko and feel, as well as role-specific dashboards.  Search has been enhanced with Quick Query, which provides more than 50 predesigned  search options to help non-technical users find information in Dynamics SL faster, drill back into entities like a document or maintenance screen, and export report results to Excel with a click rather than cutting and pasting.

Other features that Microsoft product managers described around the time of the original announcement include more integration options with Microsoft Project Server 2010, Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM through Web Services. 

Pre-built integration with Microsoft SharePoint 2010 provides several benefits.  First, SharePoint sites can be easily created and managed by project teams and the documents in SharePoint can be easily linked to specific SL entities.  And documents can be pushed to a SharePoint site directly from SL as an alternative to printing a document. 

Multi-company switching is a new feature touted by Microsoft and developed in response to user feedback.  An organization can now define multiple "companies" in Dynamics SL, like subsidiaries or major long-term programs, and log in to many of them simultaneously.  Before, to do different operations in different companies you'd have to log out, close all screens, then log in ...