We’ve all seen it many times in our projects.. Being under pressure to close these last P1 and P2 bugs by making some quick config changes in UAT, we forget to keep a record of what we did and to bring this into our Golden Config environment. And then, after cutover to Production, our users are confronted with the same issues as before.. How great would it be if we can prevent this with an extra ‘lock on the door’?More
Overlooking many recent Dynamics 365 implementations, it seems that Microsoft’s marketing strategy of ‘marrying’ Dynamics AX and CRM into one Dynamics 365 family is paying off. More and more customers are choosing for the package deal of Operations and Sales. However, as always, the marketing machine is ahead of the troops: with the current state of the integration of the products, we need to be creative in order to make the two systems feel like one.
In this blog post I’ll unveil an effective way to let Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales (CRM) interact with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (ERP)…
We’re so used to the speed of current evolvements around Microsoft Dynamics AX (or should I say Dynamics 365 ;-)), that most of us who are interested in integrations have familiarized themselves for long with concepts like data entities and entity stores. In this blog post, I would like to go beyond the ‘obvious’ by sharing 1 year of personal project experience in working with AX7 Data Management.
To enable you to quickly scan this blog post according to your own points of interest, I have listed my experiences in a top 10-alike pattern in random order.
I onboarded the AX7 technical conference this week with the impression that AX7 was ‘just’ a new UI exposing AX2012R3CU9 code on a new platform with some adjustments to ‘make it work’ on the new Azure platform. But already after the first keynote I felt embarrassed about my initial thoughts which quickly made place for respect and amaze for this enormous leap in technology.
I can only compare the way Dynamics AX has developed in the last 10 years with a boxing game: initially, the boxers tease and challenge each other by some quick targeted moves. But the game really takes off when one of them finds his ‘punch’ (say with the release of AX2012) The opponent is driven towards the corner of the boxing arena and receives punch after punch, each punch having bigger impact. I think AX7 is at the core of this ‘momentum’. In this blog I’ll share the main ‘punches’ and my personal interpretation of what’s going on. If you want to dig deeper then visit the publicly available AX7 wiki.
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.
So here’s the challenge… we have Retail CDX up-and-running… how do we hook up any middleware to integrate with 3rd party POS systems, E-commerce and other sales channels?
Hmmm… let me add one nuance here which we might overlook: how do we hook up middleware without touching the integrity of Retail CDX?
In order to answer this question I think it’s good to shortly refresh our minds about Retail CDX. Then we’ll take a look at my solution for both the batch processing as well as transactional types of interfacing.
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