2014 Dynamics AX Technical Conference Summary

It's day 3 at the AX Tech conference and, as I'm organizing my own thoughts on the conference, I thought I'd make a little extra effort to do it as a blog post.

First off, it is always a pleasure to be surrounded by so many talented individuals.  In my day to day life as a freelance consultant, I'm often the sole AX resource in the room.  It's refreshing to get to talk shop with people who do what I do every day.  Not to mention getting to interact with Microsoft personnel who are architecting and coding the next generation technology.

There are about 1300 attendees this year - customers, partners, and Microsoft employees.  As usual the Europeans seem to have the headcount advantage.  The content of the conference is focused on new functionality to be released in R3 of AX 2012.  The estimated RTM date is May 2014.

"Rainier" or AX 2015

The next version of AX is code named Rainier...and will probably be named AX 2015.  The message being communicated here is that AX 2013 R3 will define the functionality going forward and that Rainier will primarily represent technological changes, that is the new HTML5 client and a shift towards the cloud in general.  It's nice to know this so that we can dig in to 2012 R3 learning with the confidence that, functionality wise, we'll have a few years of not-to-much change.

HTML 5 Client

It has been announced that the big change coming to AX is a shift from the current rich client to a web client (HTML 5) as the primary desktop interface.  It's not clear if this change will significantly change the look and feel from 2012.  As a developer, I am very interested to see how the current code base will be transformed to be performant web-based code.  That seems like a monumental task.

Azure Infrastructure as a service

As a first step towards a cloud-hosted solution, Microsoft has made it easy to use Azure to host an instance of AX.  To be clear, this is infrastructure as a service, nothing more.  Azure is simply providing hardware that you can install your standard license of on-premises AX.

Warehouse Management /Transportation Management

The area that I was most interested in was the expansion of warehouse and transportation management capabilities.  This is the result of Microsoft's purchase of Blue Horseshoe's WAX and TRAX products.

Some new capabilities on the warehouse management side include an out-of-the-box web-based mobile inventory control client, new reservation logic allowing reservation at the warehouse level rather than the item level, license plating to track in-transit inventory, and a pick & put directive engine to prescribe inventory movement work in detail - even  based on the products properties (i.e. heavy item on bottom shelf).  Developers note: two new inventory dimensions are coming: inventory status and license plate.

The mobile client supports these functions: purchase order receipt, purchase order put-away, transfer order receipt, transfer order picking, and sales order picking.  From a developer's perspective it has a nice extensible class structure inside of AX that drives the mobile app functionality.

On the transportation management side some notable capabilities are advanced planning features for multi-destination shipment (multiple delivery addresses on one order), shipment consolidation (multiple orders for same customer), split order planning (one order, multiple truck loads).  Another key offering is the rate shopping workbench which provides a framework for calculating (or querying vendors for) shipping rates and then making a decision on which carrier to use for a particular shipment.  Multi-modal, multi-segment, multi-stop routes, accessorial/fuel charges, and routing constraints are supported by the framework.  Developers note: a good portion of the new transportation management code is in C# dlls and not able to be modified.  This is how the code was originally written before Microsoft purchased it.

Mobile device client

There are several mobile device clients that have appeared with AX 2012 R3.  First, there is the HTML-based WAX/TRAX mobile client discussed above. Then there are several of what Microsoft is calling 'companion apps' which are a set of native apps written for Windows Phone, iPhone, and Android.  These cover the functions of entering expenses, entering time sheets, and approval of expenses/timesheets.  The approach and architecture of these offerings are entirely different.  The companion apps look nice but are completely closed code.  The warehouse mobile client looks as plain as you can imagine, but is fully customizable. I was hoping to get insight into the new HTML5 client architecture at some point, but none of the R3 offerings touch on that.  Developers note: the companion apps use the Azure Service Bus to access AX.

Well, that covers just a small portion of the notes I took at the conference...but hopefully I've been able to pass along the highlights.