DALLAS – The software-as-a-service paradigm is expected to take center stage at Microsoft's Convergence conference, kicking off this weekend in Dallas.

At the company's annual conference for Microsoft Business Solutions customers and partners, executives with the Redmond software giant are on tap to highlight everything from Microsoft's hosted CRM plans, to its evolving strategy to add Web services to its existing ERP and CRM wares.

Microsoft on Monday will outline some of its goals for the next version of its Dynamics CRM product at the conference, a Microsoft representative said.

That product, code-named "Titan," and/or Microsoft CRM 4.0, is expected to provide true multi-tenancy capabilities, enabling Microsoft and other hosters to provision multiple customer accounts on a single server. That capability, if and when introduced, would put Microsoft more squarely in Salesforce.com's camp.

Microsoft will not offer new Titan details beyond what the company shared late last year, officials said.

In December 2005, Microsoft officials told Microsoft Watch that the Titan CRM release will be focused on tightly integrating Microsoft CRM with Office 2007 and, especially, Outlook 2007. Microsoft's goal is to ship Titan close to the same time as Office 2007 itself – which, at last count, is slated for January 2007.

At least for the time being, Microsoft still has no designs on hosting CRM itself, company officials have said.. If there were cases where its partners couldn't meet customer demand for CRM hosting, Microsoft might reconsider. But for now, the Microsoft is leaving CRM hosting to its channel partners.

Before Microsoft's CRM team delivers Titan, it will roll out one or more "connectors" designed to integrate CRM 3.0 with other Microsoft applications. The first of these connectors, due out in the first quarter of next year, officials said in December, will link Great Plains Dynamics 9.0 with CRM 3.0. Microsoft Business Solutions Corporate Vice President Satya Nadella reconfirmed that plan earlier this month on his blog, where he outlined Microsoft's plans to integrate its CRM and ERP offerings.

In December, Microsoft officials also downplayed the notion that Microsoft CRM is only for small/mid-size businesses, claiming the company is bidding on deals with multiple thousands of users.

Microsoft itself is moving off its internal Siebel CRM system in favor of Microsoft CRM. As of late last year, there were 20 different Microsoft CRM pilots inside Microsoft, with more pending.

Also in the software-as-a-service vein, Microsoft is continuing to make a major push to add Web services extensions to its Dynamics products.

The company recently released an RSS connector for Microsoft CRM.

"The RSS connector for CRM is built on top of the advanced find and web service Fetch functionality. For the most part it directly executes the requested query and returns the results as RSS-formatted XML," explained Michaeljon Miller, a developer on the Microsoft Business Solutions team, on his blog.

And the company is working on a number of other ways to create new "business mashups, composite applications and other "integrations," according to Nadella.

"The core vision behind what we are doing is Roles Based Productivity. To deliver on this vision, you have to start with "People" and really connect them up to their 'work' (i.e. process)," Nadella blogged. "In the real world most people's work is split across multiple applications and the 'seams' show. Web Services is the foundational infrastructure that helps us get rid of the 'seams.'"

Convergence runs through Tuesday. Keynoters include Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates; President of Microsoft's Business Systems Division Jeff Raikes; and Senior Vice President with Microsoft's Business Solutions Business Group, Doug Burgum.

(This story was updated on March 26 to include comments from Microsoft officials on Microsoft's plans to discuss the Titan Dynamics CRM release at Convergence.)