With the ongoing hunt for implementing ‘omnichannel strategies’ by Retail companies and the booming Microsoft Dynamics AX market, there must be a huge demand for integrating Microsoft Dynamics AX Retail with 3rd party POS and 3rd party E-commerce platforms. But when I google the internet for keywords like “AX 2012”, “Integration”, “3rd party”, “POS” and “E-commerce”, there are not too many hits. And if I find any hits, discussions quickly seem to head for the same solution: AIF (Application Integration Framework).

In my vision leveraging AIF in the Dynamics AX Retail area is a missed opportunity. To prove this and to provide more information regarding Dynamics AX Retail/3rd party integration in general, I’ve decided to write a series of blogs regarding this topic. In this blog post you can find the solution which I’ve recently implemented for a globally operating Retailer based on: Standard AX Retail CDX (Commerce Data Exchange). Here’s a picture of the entire architecture as described in the blog.

And in these blog posts you’ll find more related details:

Dynamics AX Retail 3rd party integration – Trigger mechanism
Dynamics AX Retail 3rd party integration – Automate process AND data exchange
Dynamics AX Retail 3rd party integration – Control dashboard
Dynamics AX Retail 3rd party integration – Agility (blog post will follow later)

I hope this series of blogs will help to create more interaction on this topic online and inspire fellow DAX’ers around the globe to fully leverage the potential of Dynamics AX Retail. Last but not least I’d like to thank BizTalk specialist Simon Emmanuel Rivas for his valuable contributions to the design I’ll present in my blogs.

Happy DAX’ing!
Patrick