As I sat through sessions at the AX 2012 R2 Technical conference, every so often there were little nuggets of information that warrant writing down. The are gotchas that aren’t discussed during the high level presentations but will have a big impact when selling and implementing. Many times these turn out to be answers to questions from the floor as participants roll the presentations around in their head and begin to envision how something might work. Here is a list of those notes.
- I will be downloading an eBook copy of the new Inside Dynamics AX 2012 book soon which was offered as part of the conference. However, as a developer you should have a hard copy of this book sitting by your computer. http://tinyurl.com/93lahd4
- Upgrades are now going to be done in-place. This means performing upgrades in iterations using deltas. Better get your head around this as it will impact any custom modifications which must have custom upgrade scripts built. For every modification there will be two scripts, one for the baseline upgrade and another to upgrade the delta.
- The very powerful Power View functionality for SQL Server Analysis Services will only be available in the spring of 2013, but we should be demoing it now to show customers what the future looks like. This tool really puts analysis power in the hands of the customer. The new Power View SharePoint control allows users to put charts and graphs they create in Power View directly on their dashboards and roll centers.
- In order to support multi-tenancy country specific functionality is now linked to legal entities, customers, and vendors. Prior to R2 much of this functionality was linked to configuration keys so if turned on, the entire instance would use that localization. This is now changed so that the functionality will be used based on the legal entity, customer, or vendor location.
- Lots of distinctions to make for partitions. I am including these in a separate post.
- If you want to use all of the new BI functionality you will need a new Microsoft Stack. ie. SQL Server 2012 with latest rollup (spring 2013), SharePoint 2013, Office 2013
- Lifecycle Services is eventually going to include a tool to export and import companies . Think of the “Copy company” functionality in AX 2009. This will be good to copy base configurations, not companies with lots of data.
- The next version of AX (6.3) will not include major updates. There will be feature packs that can be installed or not installed (not like the first feature pack).
- MS is going to be taking solution architecture very seriously going forward. There is a team of architects than can be engaged to review your solution. We should think about doing this for larger implementations.
- The Code Analysis Tool (CAT) is now a part of lifecycle services which checks for a lot more than the standard compiler and best practice checker. As a continuous update tool, expect more rules to be added as they are developed.
- There are some list pages that join to a lot of tables, especially when it comes to the organization hierarchy (vendor / customer list page). You can speed these list pages up by turning on “Find first” on the queries and by enabling join caching.
- Master planning explanations are good for one sales order explosion only. For entire run, you must use data collectors which are much harder to read. Use keyword: MRP and filter on 107, 108. (Need to try this in order to know what this means).
- There is a multi select framework now that is used on the proposed order form. This allows you to select a bunch of orders, filter, select some more orders, sort, select some more orders, then firm the orders you’ve selected. This framework can be extended to any list page where needed.
- WCF is the communication and integration framework going forward (ie. services). If you have business connector integrations, then you should start to look at migrating them.
- When upgrading to AX 2012, do as much as you can before (note: there are a few things that shouldn’t be upgraded before) the upgrade. Clean data, archive data, delete unused code (not data definitions). Also layers should be merged before.
- The data migration framework can be used to Migrate configuration data. One participant asked how to keep developer machines updated with the latest configuration changes. The answer was to try and use the data migration framework for this. We should attempt to try this and look on-line for others who may have had success using the DMF for this purpose.
- One comment made many times during the conference was that maintaining ISV solutions for all 8 versions of AX is very difficult or next to impossible. One partner said they keep a version for CU1 only because of backward compatibility issues. For example if you maintain your solution for CU3, then that model cannot be imported into CU1. I think we have actually come across this a couple of times. The official response from MS was to maintain a model file for each version or to at least have one for version which are being used by your customers.
- The future of AX and MS is in the cloud. In the next big release of AX all clients will be remote (no local processing). Because of this there was a strong suggestion to use best practices where ever possible. Also, we should think about holding off on developing rich UI interfaces right now.
- There was a great presentation by Peter Villadsen showing the LINQ provider (write queries for more than just SQL like Active Directory, Web services, etc). Also showed how the MS Solver Foundation using the Optimization Modeling Language (OML) can be used from AX (used in the product configurator). Think of problems like the traveling salesman. This framework will let you solve this, and other similar problems, in seconds. One practical application could be and auto-scheduling tool.
That’s all I have time to write for now, but may add more later.
