At the Dynamics Technical Conference 2016, conference general sessions presented by Microsoft’s AX leaders Dan Brown and Sri Srinivasan, the focus was on business process transformation and how the new Dynamics AX places emphasis on the overall user experience. This includes enhanced integration capabilities that will make work easier, no matter the location from which the user is accessing the solution. Improvements are coming not only to AX but also to Power BI , with real time analytical data. According to Brown, AX :
– Has An Intelligent user interface
– Proven business logic
– Gives Continuous life to your system
– Supports Business anytime, anywhere
Additional new capabilities for data entry, globalization, agility and lifecycle management are likely game changers.
So what are the key features?
1. AX7 is a true Saas/Paas platform that leverages the Azure platform natively
In the literal words of Mike Ehrenberg, AX is not a ‘lift-and-shift’ of AX2012R3CU9: simply shifting the on premise platform to the cloud, as many competitors have done. Microsoft has separated the AX7 application layer and the platform layer – So what? this allows AX7 to run on native Azure technology. So the many future Azure enhancements ahead will directly impact AX positively. For SQL Server, only from CTP6 Microsoft was able to run SQL Server natively on an Azure VM.
2. AX is a Microsoft-wide achievement
AX, is built on the Microsoft technology stack, ranging from SQL Server technology to Azure to BI technology. Each has its own big team of experts. It’s amazing how Microsoft has managed to blend all these broad specialisms into the AX product.
3. The new AX release is not incorporating new technology but is driving new technology.
With AX being a cloud-first platform fully in line with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s focus for service orientation, The new Dynamics is now fully in the spotlights within Microsoft AX is on a path where it drives the other Microsoft teams to enhance, instead of ‘just’ incorporating existing technologies in new releases.
A good example is real time analytics. With the market demand for real-time analytics, AX had to move away from non-real time data warehousing and SSAS technologies in favor of the new read-only secondary database (replicated in seconds) and AX entity database (replicated in minutes). Instead, AX required new technology to allow true real-time analytics. This technology was found in new SQL Server 2016 in-memory technology, leveraging indexing on columns instead of the conventional row-based indexing.
4. Enriching AX functionality exactly according to market demand
AX is developed with more customer, partner and ISV involvement. That’s something that could have been done 10 years ago. The difference is that telemetry data is collected from actual AX usage data. Based on already available data up to the recent RTW release, Microsoft is able to identify exactly which areas of AX are used most and which areas have been customized most. This enables focused targeting of all available development capacity . Imagine what will happen if Ax is enrolled to thousands of customers worldwide? On Azure Microsoft analytics can analyse how Ax is used by all customers. An ABC Analysis of use for example.
5. With the release of AX7, the production environment will no longer be accessible by customers or partners.
Microsoft ‘frees’ the customers and partners from the responsibility to maintain this environment, to apply patches and – again in the words of Mike Ehrenberg – to allow the partners and customers to focus more on unleashing the potential of the software for their respective business instead of being bothered by ‘low-value’ activities.
6. AX7 resolves many implementation pain points
With AX7 Microsoft truly expresses an ongoing focus for shortening the AX implementation cycle. Many pain points are now solved by Microsoft:
• Fast code deployment: the application code base has now been split up in multiple models. Code can now be compiled and deployed in smaller chunks and in a much faster way.
• Easier code upgrades: the conventional ‘layering’ option is still there, but custom code can now be implemented as an extension (applicable to not all but many AOT elements). As such, the extension is completely segregated from the out-of-the-box code base, which makes customizations much more flexible, especially regarding future upgrade scenarios.
• Shipping of configuration data among environments: with so called data packages (a collection of data entities which are an aggregated collection of tables and views), sets of data can easily be shipped across different environments.
• Optionally the data in the data package can be edited in Excel prior to deployment as the data package is physically nothing more than a zipped collection of Excel files added up with a header and manifest XML. So called ‘process data packages’ can even associate a data package with a specific process in the LCS process library. You can have a new sales order posted in a brand new originally empty environment in minutes.
• Multi-purpose task recorder: the new task recorder can record tasks in AX not only to train people on any task in the software (including interactive guided clicking), but can also be used to automate testing. The recorded tasks (including the data captured) can be made part of new software builds to automatically regression test the build before deployment.
• Retail: activation of a cloud-POS or mPOS device can now be done through an easy-to-use wizard. As there’s only 1 channel database for all your channels in the new cloud topology, the wizard pre-populates the channel database URL and also the stores the device can be associated for (based on the Azure AAD user > worker > store address book > store association).
7. Life Cycle Services (LCS) is a requirement and can no longer be avoided.:
• AX no longer provides access to production environments, so the telemetry LCS offers is crucial in identifying issues. LCS is leveraged to quickly deploy a representative environment, load relevant reference test data and to simulate the issue with a task recording.
• Data packages and other assets are all stored in the LCS Asset Library. LCS is the central repository for storage and deployment across the various environments. LCS has a hierarchical structure: a ‘corporate’ section which allows re-using ‘assets’ among different projects.
8. Support 2.0
AX now re-defines the way you can support your users. Users record the issue they face through the task recorder and create a ticket from AX which is directly converted into a Visual Studio work item for the support engineer. The major impact here is the available telemetry for the support engineer: AX continuously logs system performance and system activity along the way, the work item is automatically enriched with a ‘snapshot’ of the state of the system at the time the issue occurred: what browser did the user utilize, what batch jobs were running, what was the user doing exactly etc.
9. Business process orientation
The new AX UI offers a better way to expose application functionality to the business users: workspaces. Workspaces are reminiscent of role centers: tiles are the new cues, tabbed lists are the old enterprise portal enabled list pages (although the new ‘tab’ structure is very handy) and charts and links can be embedded as role center offered (although far more sophisticated now). However, a user is now offered numerous workspaces, all supporting a specific set of tasks related to a process with which the user is affiliated. The set of workspaces together forms the user’s dashboard.
10. New features
There are fewer because of the other technical topics mentioned, but AX still offers some great new features – a glimpse of the less prominent features:
• Finance: cross company general journal entry: creating and posting journals without having to switch companies.
• Retail: download updates to mPOS from the device form directly (self-service installer). Process: a new update is made available by IT and a store manager can download and run the update package locally in the store.
• Enterprise search and ribbon search: Use ALT+G to open enterprise search and then type “U C” and AX7 will open“Unit Conversion” immediately – one click and you’re in the form. Navigate to other pages by changing the URL. Type ALT+Q and to search for a specific function in the ribbon, regardless of the tab group tow which the function belongs.
• Invenotry cost analysis
11. The cloud: a new way of thinking.
With the AX cloud release some basic on-premise functions have suddenly become a challenge. Some examples and how Microsoft will tackle these:
• Accessing on-premise files and folders is not possible from the cloud: AX can no longer poll on-premise folders and pull-in files for processing. For example in recurring integration scenarios. Microsoft has exposed an API for a source system to push a file into Azure blob storage accompanied by an enqueuing message which flags a recurring AX batch job that there’s a file to be processed. Microsoft will ship an application to do the enqueuing (and similar dequeuing for exports) on behalf of the source (or target) application. This application will be able to work with processing folders (IN, ERROR, COMPLETED etc.) as many customers were used to with the DIXF batch job .
•(Printing on local network printers is not possible from the cloud. We need an on-premise pull mechanism. Microsoft will ship a ‘document routing agent’ which will query an Azure queue for messages which contain meta data for new documents to be printed (stored in Azure blob storage). Network printers can be configured on a specific form in AX7 which will allow the Azure queue message to contain meta data about to which printer the ‘document routing agent should send the document
• Hot keys: the different browsers have different reserved hot keys. To stay as much in line as possible with current hot keys users are familiar with, Microsoft has been creative. For example, the ‘new record’ hot key CTRL+N has been replaced by ALT+N, which is still pretty familiar for hot key addicts.
12. Relatively low threshold for adopting AX.
It’s a challenge to develop and release a new product which involves so many paradigm shifts. So why will the AX adoption to be relatively easy?:
• Developers will embrace Visual Studio, the AOT is re-arranged a bit and developers have to get used to work with the extensions and file based code and packages. X++ is largely untouched (only enriched at some points) and for those who have some Visual Studio experience, a lot of ‘new’ things are common to .NET/Visual Studio in general.
• The cloud environment requires a new way of thinking, but most things will be managed by Microsoft ‘under the water’. As always, understanding the concept is much easier than having to become a specialist in an area.
• With the earlier CTPs operating the new AX7 UI is a bit different than the familiar AX2012 navigation. But with RTW the similarities are very clear. The area pages are back, form dyna-linking (selecting a different record in the list page is reflected in a details form) is working flawlessly and the old ribbon and favorites are still there.
