Part 1 of this blog series outlined the problem that, as the number of systems, applications, databases, and whatnot platforms increases, the IT business community requires a holistic approach across all these various systems to provide a single point of running IT jobs and workload automation. It also pointed out the difficulties in achieving this noble idea, and introduced Advanced Systems Concepts Inc. (ASCI) and its ActiveBatch cross-platform enterprise job scheduling and workload automation solution. Read the rest of this entry »

I can partly understand analysts’ temptation to beat up on Microsoft’s forays into the enterprise applications space. To be fair, ”the empire” has had its share of strategic and tactical miscues, as if it had wanted to give these naysayers some ammunition. For one, many analysts and market observers first criticized the giant for not having a unified enterprise resource planning (ERP) product line, but rather several diverse ones, coming from acquisitions of former Great Plains Software and Navision Software a/s.

Today, we are talking about the following four Microsoft Dynamics ERP product lines:

1. Microsoft Dynamics GP (formerly Great Plains) [evaluate this product];
2. Microsoft Dynamics NAV (formerly Navision) [evaluate this product];
3. Microsoft Dynamics SL (formerly Solomon) [evaluate this product] ; and
4. Microsoft Dynamics AX (formerly Axapta) [evaluate this product] .

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