Sunday, March 16, 2008

Future of ERP systems and Microsoft Dynamics

f you want to make your next enterprise resource planning (ERP) investment a long-lasting one, you better know something about the future. Stewart McKie, a 20-year veteran of IT consulting, gives his opinion on two major emerging technologies and advises on how to implement them.

You can't keep information secret. It wants to get out. It dies if it doesn't circulate. For proof, look at the evolution of business applications. From departmental systems to enterprise systems to business partner integration, the trend is to spread information further and further.

It's hardly surprising. The better informed you are, the better positioned you are to act. So it's important to know which new technologies are currently helping to spread the word. According to McKie, there are two emerging technologies that you can't ignore. The first is Web services and the second is XML (extensible markup language).

"Until XML came along," McKie says, "there was no technology that could unleash the full potential of business collaboration. Now everyone has pretty much decided that XML will be the standard for exchanging documents between systems." With the emergence of the Internet and XML, EDI (electronic data interchange linking systems with different data formats) has become cost-effective and accessible to all.

http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/businessneeds/erp_future.mspx

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