Microsoft Great Plains software

We are about to purchase some personnel software from Microsoft Great Plains, and are considering their financial software. Does anyone have any idea what Microsoft will do about the Navision personnel and financial software following the takeover? I am based in the UK.

For now all the systems you can read about on http://www.microsoft.com/businesssolutions/ will co-exists. I think that Microsoft will do a good work to position the different systems in the market - something that Navision (after the Navision Software / Damgaard Data merger) never succeeded very much in. But I don’t know if the winner (if we can talk about a winner) will be the products from Great Plains or Navision. My guess is that it will be the products from Navision - because some of the articles about the Microsoft / Navision deal have be writing that one of the major reason for Microsoft to purchase Navision was that their products was more in synch with Microsoft than the products from Great Plains. So make your own guess… Best regards, Erik P. Ernst, webmaster

I don’t know the specifics for the UK, but here in the US, Attain utilizes the VisionPay product. VisionPay actually purchased the original code from Navision US and has improved the functioality and added to it. VisionPay was also the same group that did the payroll for Great Plains…at least here in the US. No one knows for sure, but there is no reason for this to change.

Hello Paul, I have no idea which product wil dominate but I suspect neither. Navision will continue to dominate in Europe and Great Plains in North America until one .Net product is complete. Why alienate any customer base when you don’t have to right? To say that Navision is more “in tune” with Microsoft is asinine. How anyone give this credit is beyond me: Navision development basically uses a derivative of Pascal code. Yeah thats in line with Microsoft Great Plains has been a major force in the testing and development of SQL while Navision clients predominantly use a proprietary database. In fact Navision has had major issues trying to use SQL as the database of choice. Can anyone say “deadlocking”. All Microsoft developemnt languages can be used with Great Plains (try using VB with Navision). Great Plains likely has about 50,000 installs on SQL

Microsfot is a very astute company. Just about everything that Bill Gates has touched has turned to gold, (or at least it turned to silver, and converted the competition into lead ). Anyone will do well to go with any of the current Microsoft offerings. Of couse I will say that Attain is the best, but after 11 years, I am a little biased. The only advise I have to people making decisions now, is that the product now becomes irrelevant, important is who supplies and supports it. Just make sure that you go with a partner that supports all three products, then they make money no matter what, so their best option is to offer you the best product for your needs. _________________________ David Singleton Navision Consultant since 1991 dmks22@comcast.net___________