I’ve just read the PressPass from the last Microsoft Business Solutions Convergence Customer Conference, where Microsoft highlighted the company's strategy for business applications and detailed its road map to partners and customers.
I’m happy to see that the rumours on the air are all confirmed: Project Green, the code name for next-generation Microsoft Business Solutions‘ development efforts, will be delivered over the course of two waves.
The first wave will occur between 2005 and 2007, and will include the release of a shared user interface based around 50 common configurable roles that people have within a company, all seamlessly integrated with Microsoft Office. Microsoft's business applications also will interoperate with service-oriented applications and include a common configurable reporting environment based on SQL Server Reporting Services and a common security-enhanced intranet and extranet environment based on SharePoint Portal Server to enable new levels of collaboration within and across companies.
The second release wave, which will begin shipping in 2008, will build on the first wave's innovation and apply a model-driven approach to business processes. Innovations released during the second wave will draw on the power of WinFX and Visual Studio.NET.
Wonderful news… the integration of the MBS world with .NET Framework and tecnlogies like Sharepoint and SQL Reporting Services is what I was waiting for. 
The other interesting news from the conference (obviously, for me… 
) are this:
- Microsoft will launch Microsoft Navision® 4.01 in the third quarter of 2005: the launch of Navision 4 is “on road” in these days, so seeing that a new minor version will be launched during the year give me to think that it will be only a bug-fix release, with improvements only on the areas that now have problems.
- The next version of Microsoft CRM will be released to manufacturing in the fourth quarter of 2005: I’ve not too much news about this new CRM release. I hope it will be improved on the “integration-side” (now interact with CRM is not so easy).
The MBS world is in movement…