SAN DIEGO — Microsoft is rejiggering its roadmap for its family of Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) ERP and CRM offerings.

At the annual MBS Convergence customer conference here, Microsoft executives on Monday outlined the latest roadmap for its Axapta, Great Plains, Navision, Solomon, Microsoft CRM and other related wares.

The biggest — and most confusing — change is around Microsoft's Project Green. At last year's Convergence show, Microsoft officials were not keen on talking about Green. This year, Microsoft's MBS brass are delivering a new, evolutionary Green message and timetable.

The unified Green platform, as of last year, was slated to arrive by 2008. But now Microsoft isn't talking about a unified platform at all. Instead, it is talking about two different Green "waves" via which it will make more of its existing ERP offerings look and work more similarly.

In Wave 1, which is "now," according to Microsoft Senior Vice President Doug Burgum, Microsoft will deliver common "role-based user experience" across its existing MBS family. It also will make SharePoint the common portal and workflow engine for the MBS products and surface SQL-Server-based "contextual business intelligence" across its MBS products, Burgum told attendees of his Monday Convergence kick-off keynote.

Wave 2, which Burgum characterized as "more of a next-year thing," will bring more commonality to the different MBS offerings. Microsoft expects to introduce with Wave 2 common model-drive design processes; alignment with Longhorn, the Windows client release due in 2006; and alignment with Office 12, the version of Office due in 2006.

Burgum said to expect Green Wave 1 to run from 2005 to 2007 and Wave 2 to run from 2008 to some unspecified future date. He did not provide any kind of date as to when the final, unified code base that originally was known as Green will ship.

Burgum told keynote attendees that Microsoft is extending the lifecycle support for its Axapta, Great Plains, Solomon, Navision and Microsoft CRM applications from three years to five years. That way, wherever Microsoft is in its upgrade cycle, customers can opt to stay with the versions of the MBS products which they have installed and working for a longer period of time.

At the same time, Burgum told keynote attendees to expect Microsoft to release upgrades of all four of its ERP lines by the latter half of 2006.

Microsoft officials acknowledged that Axapta 3.0, the next major version of Microsoft's high-end ERP offering won't be released until the first half of 2006 — a year later than expected. They also reiterated that Microsoft CRM 2.0 won't be released to manufacturing until the fourth quarter of 2005. CRM 2.0 was set to go gold in March.

Officials laid out a timetable for other MBS products: