Microsoft Corp. announced Monday the latest version of its Business Portal, bringing other collaborative capabilities from the company to the product, which is used with Microsofts Great Plains and Solomon business applications.
Release 2.0 of the Microsoft Business Solutions Business Portal utilizes Microsofts SharePoint services as its underlying infrastructure for information delivery and collaboration, bringing such SharePoint capabilities as document libraries, event calendars and meeting sites to Business Portal pages as Web Parts.
The new architecture supports sharing and collaborating on documents, easier creation of new pages, adding Microsoft Excel graphs to portal pages, and sites for projects and meetings, and connecting with external data sources, Microsoft officials said.
Other enhancements to Business Portal 2.0 include multi-level direct reports and performance review functionality in the Great Plains Human Resource Management (HRM) Self Service Suite; the Portal serves as the interface to the suite.
Solomon customers get a new Payroll Time and Attendance module, which allows employees to enter timecards through Microsoft Business Portal.
Lastly, Microsoft lowered per-user pricing for Business Portal 2.0 to $20 to $40 per user based on the number of licenses. The company also added a new unlimited user license for $40,000.
Business Portal 2.0 is available now through Microsoft Certified Business Solutions reseller partners.
