2012 R2 Technical Conference Notes

Check out the conference tweets to get a feel of the buzz: #AX2012R2

There are blog posts already out there with notes from the conference. Here is a compilation of my takeaways.

Executive Summary

• There has been a big push for better BI. AX out-of-the box BI in 2009 was awful (admitted by BI team). 2012 and now R2 BI is beautiful and fully usable toolset for a broad range of BI stories. There are multiple streams of BI ranging from corporate KPI’s to personal BI with self-service analysis. Going forward we should be embracing the Microsoft stack in this space. In order to take full advantage of what has been delivered we need to build our BI solutions using AX tools and save them back to the AOT. More on this later.
• Microsoft has done a lot in the retail space. The biggest part that was presented during the keynote was their web storefront solution. Basically you can create a fully functioning on-line store with product filters, visualizations and processing capabilities all backed by an AX database. Want to offer a new product? Just release it in your inventory module in AX and it shows up in the on-line store. Set inventory dimensions up and the user will be able to filter to find exactly what they need.
• Lifecycle Services are a set of tools that have been released to help with AX implementations. The tools are on-line so resources working on a project can work with the implementation information can all go to one place. This includes Microsoft who could be given access when called in to help out. Included tools: InformationSource, RapidStart update, Data import & export (use this to export a template company and import into other companies), Code analyzer, Diagnostic tool. This is a continuous update platform that will have new tools, features, and functionality deployed as they are ready. Many of these tools are cloud based (including the code analyzer) and is the direction in which Microsoft is header. Steve Balmer said: “We’re all in” referring to cloud technologies. The next version of AX will be release on the Azure platform.
• A considerable amount of effort has gone into enabling AX 2012 R2 for multi tenancy. By this I mean partitions. When AX 2012 was released many tables were made global in an attempt to normalize company data and encourage sharing. Many global clients have requirements that certain company data cannot be shared between legal entities due to internal policy or government controls. However, they do not want to install multiple instances of AX which requires more overhead and administration. To solve this partitions were introduced which will completely separate a group of legal entities from each other. When logging into a different partition a separate AX icon must be used. Partitioning has been implemented across the entire solution including reporting and analysis services. As part of this change, the model store has been moved into its own database as well.
• Master planning has been beefed up with new visibility tools that give insight into why the planner makes the decisions it does. From a sales order explosion a new tab is available called “Explanation” which can be used to see a log of every decision point along the way. ie. Order size quantity was increased because of a minimum order size. The entire master planning run can also be logged but makes use of data collectors and analyzed outside of AX. Action graphs have been added to visually show relationships between orders and the affect an an action will have on that order. You can also automatically apply actions to an order using a wizard.
• Budget planning has been completely built out as part of the standard solution. AX can now manage the entire budget planning process from the Finance to Production to the Departments and back again. The process is controlled via workflow and users can enter data making use of the office interop using Excel templates. This is nothing like what is available in AX 2012. I have a video you should watch of the demo if you are a finance person.
• AX 2012 Enterprise Academy is being beefed up and pushed to better educate the partner field. Once you get into the 300 level courses (solution architect) workshops are offered directly with the solution architect team at Microsoft. These are unstructured sessions where participates work through a real world scenario and are required to build a solution. Testing is performed along the way to ensure that participants are absorbing the content. These workshops are for professionals who have real world experience working with AX. If you would like to be come a certified Solution Architect with Microsoft, then you may want to consider engaging in this learning path.

More notes to come which will dive deeper into these and other areas.