Dynamics reseller ePartners has launched a portal, www.erpcloudpower.com, that generates a customized pricing quote for prospects and provisions a free, 30-day trial of Microsoft Dynamics AX, GP or SL in the cloud. The portal, the company says, is designed for a streamlined approach for evaluating purchases of Dynamics and other cloud-based Microsoft technologies. Many of us may still be thinking, "Which Dynamics products are those other than Dynamics CRM Online?" since the Dynamics ERP cloud still is hosted  applications.  And the whole import of Steve Ballmer's cloud speech at Convergence – and I guess clouds are mainly vapor – was that a true SaaS product won't be on the market until next year with the next version of Dynamics NAV.

Blogs get picked on here regardless of vendor affiliation. But it's not all blogs.  It's those that don't deliver on what should be a good idea. Today’s victim is the "Executive Insights" blog on the Dynamics community page. I would really love to see opinions and commentary from executives at Microsoft Business Solutions, except that we rarely get it and it’s been a while. Instead, the blog has bogged down in run-of-the-mill marketing posts and there are few of those. The last one was March 3 and the one before then is December 6. Executives are busy so if they can't work this into their schedule, fine, but then turn the space over to something else and change the title. Read more...

SAP is rolling out a subscription-based hosted version of SAP Business One with the product scheduled for this country later this year. Hosted B1 is already available in China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Southeast Asia, Spain and the United Kingdom. The company said hosting will be available only through its partners such as CAP Solutions, Datalab, Fasttrack, Onyx and Seidor.