Dynamics SL starts showing off Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services

Yesterday I watched a webinar put on by Brian Lloyd, Plumbline Solutions, on Dynamics SL and Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS).  For some time owners of Microsoft GP and SL have had a hidden pearl on their price list for clients to MOSS.  Moss is a supercharged version of Windows SharePoint services and there are some very powerful add incapability’s with Moss.   It is interest to see how many of our larger customers seem to be using or at least experimenting with Moss.  I am expecting with this lower price point for Moss clients, when working with Dynamics SL and GP, will be picking up shortly.

One of the new things coming with the Feature Pack for 7.0 Dynamics SL was the ability to publish selective documents to the Moss web portal.  The portal can be customized for the needs of a Dynamics SL employee, a customer or a vendor.   Examples of published documents from the back office include: draft or final project invoices for the Project managers to view, order confirmation and order invoice documents for customers.  All of these published documents flow seamlessly from the ERP system to the web portal and greatly enhance the customer service level for all viewers.

Getting information to people in a timely and efficient manner has always been a key goal for ERP systems. It is really exciting to see the merging of the Microsoft stack of technologies (ie Moss, SL, SQL etc) as we see more and more info coming via these web portals. The day when these options were only open to fortune 100 customers are definitely being left behind.  I see this movement being used by any size company who values keeping employees, vendors, and customer informed with 24/7 access to their data.

What do you think about the future of web portals at your company?  Have you experimented with Moss or Windows SharePoint Services 3.0?

Comments

[Ken Phelps]

We have SL 6.5 and MOSS 2007 up and running. Not tied together yet, since we haven't upgraded to SL 7. I wish we knwe more about what can be done together, so I appreciate your post suggesting potential ideas. We have the Project Server integration with SL, so we'll be anxious to publish project schedules to clients.

[Jeff Cozens]

Kevin, We are likely to see the Feature Pack (FP) for Solomon 7.0 come out mid summer. Unfortunately, you must be on version 7.0, which uses Business Portal 4.0, to really start getting the advantage of Moss. As to the goal of publishing schedules for projects that looks like a feature in this feature pack. From the demo I saw, you can create from within Solomon project maintenance screen, with a click of a button, a bp site for the project you have open. Once this project site is up, using document libraries you should be able to publish your schedules. Moss has some nice document management features that you will like. I have been told that getting Moss and BP running on the same box would be difficult. Are you doing this?

Regards,

Jeff Cozens