Over time Microsoft and its partners will add additional online processes in other functional areas. One area of focus for Microsoft Dynamics in the Live era is analytics, which will benchmark a business’ performance against similar companies, enabling them to focus on continuous improvement of business processes.

• Online collaboration services will enable organizations to connect their processes to customers, partners, suppliers and businesses of all types. At Convergence EMEA this capability was demonstrated in a new service that helps Microsoft Dynamics users collaborate and share business processes via hosted Windows SharePoint Services technology with other businesses, enabling them to easily and quickly configure collaboration and supply chain scenarios that previously would have required complex extranet, virtual private networking (VPN) and firewall technology.

• Online communities will be directly integrated into the Microsoft Dynamics role-based user experience, enabling Microsoft and its partners to deliver a rich set of learning tools in the form of online forums, tutorials and best practices based on each user’s industry, role, geographic location and language.

Microsoft also announced expanded opportunities for its partners by adding a hosted subscription model for Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Microsoft Dynamics SL and Microsoft Dynamics AX. This new licensing model — part of Microsoft’s Service Provider License Agreement program — will enable Microsoft customers to subscribe to a partner-hosted version of Microsoft Dynamics enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions on a monthly basis, helping reduce deployment time for businesses that need a new solution immediately.

The Convergence 2006 EMEA conference also marks the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) launch of Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0, with availability in 36 new countries around the world including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, South Africa and those of the United Kingdom over the course of the next two months. Through the use of Web services and other enhancements, this highly anticipated release delivers a complete ERP package to automate and streamline processes across a company’s financials, customer relationships, business services, human resources and the supply chain. Microsoft Dynamics AX enables 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.