EMEA Convergence 2015 and „AX7“ – my personal summary

Here’s what I tell AX colleagues about EMEA Convergence 2015 or better: What I tell them about „AX7“ – I leave out the happy hour 😉

User Experience

  • The new HTML5 client has a very clean, modern look. All the colorful action pane icons that were new in (AX2009 and) AX2012 are gone again.
  • We see a “responsive design”: When you resize the window (manually, or use it on a device with a different scale), the control are reorganized nicely.
  • All in all, the rendering / building of the forms seems to be a lot “calmer” than before. No flickering, no superfluous repaints.
  • Dynalink / “follow-me” functionality is still available: From a list of records (former list page), you can still open a second (third etc.) related form whose content follows the record selection on the main list.
  • Dialogs that open from a form, will “slide in” from the right side and cover a bit of the main form: This would be, f.ex. the dimension / offset dimension form on a general ledger journal, the dialog for posting a journal etc.
  • One AX HTML client session can only have one main window! If you need, for example, the list of relevant purchase orders, the planned purchase orders and the invent table and stock on hand, you’ll open three AX sessions. Important to note: Microsoft is going to limit the number of sessions a user can open!

Workspaces

  • Instead of the role center / start page, we now see so called workspaces. A user will have access to several workspaces, where each workspace covers a typical process that’s relevant for the user’s role.
  • Within a workspace, you’ll find entry points for list pages (with different filters) and other forms, as well as PowerBI charts that are relevant to the given process.

Data integration

  • For integration, the AIF and DIXF have been merged; AIF goes away, AXD classes don’t exist anymore, it’s DIXF that’s won.
  • MS has so far defined about 1600 entities.
  • MS will also provide predefined “entity groups” to cover typical scenarios where entities are used together.

The task recorder now has a replay button – phrasing it like this doesn’t do it justice:

  • Prerecorded scripts can be used to guide users through new processes or processes they rarely use. Microsoft will provide recordings through LCS (lcs.dynamics.com). AX partners and customers can create their own recordings, too.
  • Also, the recording can be converted to a C# test script. This can of course be nothing more than a starting point for a real, maintainable test script, but it’s nice to have that starting point anyhow.

Power BI

  • We see PowerBI controls directly embedded into the new workspaces. It looks very pleasant and easy to use and is certainly an eye catcher. We will have to wait and see how well it will work in real scenarios in a production Environment.

Cloud / Azure

  • The new AX will at first only be available on public cloud. The first (TAP) customers are already “live”.
  • Installations on private cloud will be possible in the 2nd HY 2016.

Lifecycle Services

  • are now a lot more integrated with the project in the sales, the implementation and the production phase. Here, too, I’m curious to see how it will work out in real Projects.

Developer experience

  • We already knew that X++ is still there, but the developer environment is Visual Studio (yeah!).
  • I didn’t hear anyhing new in Addition to this.
  • Esp. there was nothing about how to set up “real life” deployment structures that work.

Of course, the best thing to do is to get your hands on the new AX yourself:

The Public Preview was announced for “early December” (https://news.microsoft.com/2015/11/19/microsoft-dynamics-ax-delivers-the-power-of-the-cloud-to-businesses/), but it’s not here yet. But at least, there now is an official placeholder where we should find it soon, I hope: https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/northamerica/readiness-training/readiness-training-news/AX7LaunchPortal

 

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