What’s coming in the future Ax 201X ? :) – KeyNote Day 2 @ Dynamics Ax2012 R2

The Keynote on Day 2 had to two portions one focusing on the LifeCycle and the other on What’s cooking for the future ?

Mike Ehrenberg, Technical fellow @ Microsoft was the one who came down to feed our curiosity.

Major  innovations are happening in these areas,

Modern Client:

– Microsoft is looking to see how it can totally revamp the UI to fit it with the happening story of Windows 8. They are totally trying to give a new face to the ERP interface by attempting to give importance to Data visualizations and Tile way of organizing information.

– There is also this attempt to eliminate Rich and Poor 😉 Clients to have one common client that can work over the internet or one premise

– Microsoft Recommendation is not to make UI investment for the current release on the Product as their can happen something to what happened to the legacy reports

Performance and Scale

– Cloud concentric approach where they try to leverage the Private cloud concept to create a On-Premise kind of setup of Ax

-Scalability is brought in through the Cloud Infrastructure

Simplifying Customization’s and Upgrade

– Microsoft is working hard to make code upgrade smoother and simpler (Refer Programming Improvements with Dynamics Ax)

– Other interesting area is to no downtime data upgrade. Here the concept is take snapshots of the database and upgrade the db in parallel then upgrade the Delta that has been created through a iterative approach.

Application Life Cycle Management

– Mike was definite to point out that the slew of Life cycle tools that we see is the reflection of their efforts towards this direction

– The current ALM tools are meant only to be a teaser and more is to come

Innovation Areas

Integration of  other products.

– There is also work in progress for bringing in Skype, Yammer in to the ERP Platform to break the barriers  and connect it to the external world much more in a seamless manner

– Kinect integration is also seriously considered. The last few attempts of showcasing kinect was early attempts but there is efforts to built in more ERP specific context to the kinect SDK that can take voice commands and relate it to the Forms in the ERP

– BING: There is also exploration going on to see how to bring the power of search in to the ERP and take the ERP search also little further it’s current limits of the Database.

Product Integrations

Preparing for the future

– Avoid UX investments

– Educate on Windows Private Cloud

– Adopt and stick to Best Practice that ensures your transition would be smoother and predictable

– Move to Dynamics ax 2012 R2