For the past few months, Microsoft has been turning up the volume on its mid-market plans. On Wednesday, the company's top brass is set to unveil Microsoft's comprehensive mid-market product and channel strategy.

While Microsoft officials declined to talk specifics prior to the Wednesday Business Summit, to which the Redmond software vendor has invited 300 mid-size business customers and their channel partners, some of its planned unveilings are no secret.

Microsoft identifies "mid-size customers" as those with more than 25 but fewer than 500 PCs connected to the Internet.

At the summit, according to sources, Microsoft will take the official wraps off what has been described as a mid-market server bundle akin to Windows Small Business Server. That product, tentatively known as Windows Midmarket Server, will include four Microsoft server SKUs, plus Windows Server, into a single offering.

Sources said Microsoft won't ship Windows Midmarket Server bundle until 2007, however, since the bundle will be built around Longhorn Server, which is due out that same year.

In the interim, Microsoft will continue to push a mid-market promotional bundle that the company introduced this summer. That Windows Server System offering for mid-size users is comprised of three Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition SKUs (due to be replaced by three Windows Server 2003 R2 SKUs, once that product ships later this year); one Exchange Server 2003 Standard Edition SKU; and one Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 Workgroup Edition SKU.

Microsoft also is using the Wednesday mid-market event to roll out at least two non-mid-market-specific products. Microsoft officials confirmed last month that the summit will be the launch pad for the Microsoft Small Business Accounting 2006 and Office Small Business Management Edition 2006 products. Industry watchers see the Small Business Accounting product as Microsoft's intended competitor to Intuit's QuickBooks.

Microsoft's Own Private 'Mendocino'

Microsoft also is expected to highlight during the day-long business summit its progress toward making its Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) products look and feel more like Microsoft Office.

MBS officials have been saying for months that the division's "Project Green" strategy revolves around more tightly integrating their CRM, ERP and supply-chain applications with Office.

In June, MBS corporate Vice President Satya Nadella told Microsoft Watch that MBS has plans to provide the same kind of Office-line-of-business integration that Microsoft and SAP are devising via their jointly developed "Mendocino" technology.

"We have rich metadata that we can expose via IBF (Microsoft's Information Bridge Framework). Using that, we can build Office solutions that bind to our back end. And users won't need to wait and we won't need to charge (extra) for it," Nadella said.

(IBF is a bridging tool that is designed to connect Microsoft Office applications to back-end enterprise systems.)

Microsoft's plan is to offer this integrated Office front end as part of the upcoming releases of Great Plains, Navision, Axapta and Solomon applications, Nadella said.

MBS is building a raft of features into the next version of Great Plains that will be very business-intelligence-focused. And MBS is working on similar Office-back-end integrations between Office and Microsoft CRM 2.0; Office and Navision 4.0 Service Pack 1; and Office and Axapta 4.0.

According to sources close to the company, Microsoft also could go public with a rebranding campaign for its MBS family of products.

Microsoft partners said earlier this year that the company was considering doing some kind of Office for Sales, Office for Call Center and Office for Self-Service offerings. But Microsoft may simply be using these designations as the new names for some of the MBS family members, said another source, who asked not to be named.

The business summit keynote addresses of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer will be made available by Web cast.