Looking Beyond Dynamics GP 2010, Microsoft Aims to Extend Footprint, Integration, and Usability

Although Microsoft just released Dynamics GP 2010 in May, the company is focusing on the next iterations of the ERP product with an eye toward extending GP's footprint for new and existing customers.

"We were trying to push the envelope with that with GP 2010," Rich Miller, US Product Marketing, Microsoft Dynamics GP, said at a recent Microsoft webinar on upgrading to GP 2010. "What we're going to look to do going forward is to continue to innovate on those things and make GP 2010 one of the preeminent midmarket solutions in the marketplace."

With GP 2010 Microsoft included new functionality to enhance business intelligence (BI) including role-based reports and metrics to increase the relevance of reports for different users.  Those tools also included preconfigured dashboards for roles from purchasing to the executive suite, as well as preconfigured home pages for people in roles like accounts receivable and payable transactions, according to Miller.

Miller said Microsoft would continue to focus on driving additional simplicity in the product for current customers and provide rapid ROI for new customers that are implementing GP for the first time.

"We're looking to create additional productivity tools extending further into Office and extending further into SharePoint-tools that many of us already own-so we get more and more value out of those tools," Miller said. "We're calling it GP 12 right now and it's something we'll see in the 2012 time frame. Then as we get out into GP 14-we're looking at the 2015, 2016 time frame-we're looking at the next generation interface that will allow web deployablity in ways that we haven't seen yet with Dynamics GP. Getting even more role tailored and contextual in the workflow and even deeper integration into Microsoft."

What Microsoft is doing, Miller said, is enhancing the ...