New beginning - Microsoft Dynamics AX 7 Reloaded

Dynamics AX 7 public preview has already been launched recently and right now all Partners and Customers should be able to start getting the feel of the next generation cloud powered ERP. The direction from Microsoft after the leadership change has been quite apparent, that there is going to be a very VERY BIG focus on the cloud aka Azure based services and applications. And the apparent change in removal of the rich client is a game changer in the ERP. Everything now runs on the internet explorer(or Chrome if you like it)! Hell yeah, now the sales team has much more to wow the customer about the ease of web use and truly a cross platform UX experience. The AX 7 ERP solution should be able to cater to a varied and most industries from Finance to Manufacturing , Supply chain to Retail and almost every other industry that is in between or probably even a hybrid.
Everyone goes gaga on the cloud, what is it all about? What this means for the customers and partners is, they can start deploying the environments on Azure and this completely eliminates the need for a disaster recovery solution. Microsoft will be responsible for the data centers and customers can have high availability service agreements depending on the business continuity recovery times.
Will Microsoft not release an On Premise version of AX 7? Nope, it means Microsoft just wants to prioritize in getting it right for the cloud customers first before the launch of next release which will be On Premise version. Another factor that's tied to the release of an on premise version is the general availability of Windows server 2016 which has native features on ADFS(Active Directory Federation Services) which simply means that you can use this component to authenticate non active directory users within the server. The current Windows Server will support if you download an add-on for ADFS to enable this feature.
There is a mammoth of goodies on the features for the new release, I am not sure where to start but some of them are HTML5 based UX, LCS manageability, cross platform support on web/mobile, full visual studio integration and many more.
General availability of AX 7 is still in the Q1 2016 and going by the momentum it should be out in a a few more weeks, The current version which the public release is made for the partners and customers is based on the CTP 8 which has the version(7.0.1186.16043)


PS: All versions indicated are correct at the time of publishing of post, Microsoft may change version numbers as and when kernel updates are made available or after GA.

Dynamics AX 7 expected to be released in Q1 2016

Microsoft has announced that the next version of the AX 7, which is completely hosted as a web application is proposed to be released in first quarter of 2016. The best news yet that has been from the Dynamics AX release team is it would be available for public preview exclusively for Partners and Customers from early December 2015.
Checkout the press release reports to get to know more about what coming in the next release!

Dynamics AX 2012 R3 CU10 released

The latest cumulative update of hotfixes for the AX 2012 R3 has been released from LCS, the original release post from the Dynamics AX in Market Engineering team can be found here. The latest build has been updated to 6.3.3000.110 but if you use slip stream option for a full installation the build number will be shown as 6.3.3000.111.
Coming back to the post what's updated in the latest hotfix basket in Retail, probably the most important is the POS performance. The biggest strength in the Retail POS is its ability to automatically calculate the best discount that can be applied to the transaction based on the products/store/customer/period combinations. But it turns out to be the biggest performance backdrop if the discounts/products increases more than tens of thousands of records. It seems there has been some issues addressed for these scenarios by adding a maximum number of steps/loops before the best price has been picked up for the product within the shopping cart. And this has been implemented as a configuration in the Retail parameters. The functionality should have come long time back, even though too late but better now than never.

Retail Time Clock Entries

If you have been using the Retail Module, you might have noticed there are couple of operations called Time Clock and View Time Clock.

The time clock operations enable the Store to capture the Cashier/Supervisors working shift schedule by capturing their clock in/out information. The functionalities enables HQ to capture the exact times that a cashier has come for work, duration of breaks and when he signed off for the day. This is not linked to the Login/Log off details of the cashiers but built as a decoupled functionality to store the time registrations for employees.
The huge potential that we can see it is fully integrated with the Retail and HR module, enabling you to generate working time reports or send this data to payroll systems to process the cashiers salary. Please do note the operations performed in the Time clock entries are all real time meaning the Terminal should be fully online and active connection available to make the time clock entries. Before you can start using the Time registration for Employees, make sure to activate Time registration in terminals for those employees.
After you have made some Clock in/Break For Lunch/Clock out, you can immediately start seeing the Time registration transactions under the Worker > Time Registration Tab > Journal Registrations.

Azure Marketplace - Evaluation version for Dynamics AX 2012 R3

Life Cycle Services has just announced in their July 2015 Release that they are releasing the Evaluation version of AX for all Customers and Partners. This follows a similar concept of Dynamics CRM when they offered a 30 day trials for anyone who wanted to try the CRM online. 

The details that you would need is a valid LCS account and Azure portal access, some of the other details that you need to select/check are Location, Sizing, LCS project and T&C's. Currently you will only be able to deploy the AX 2012 R3 version, and it aptly seems to pave the way for the AX 7.0 version which is supposed to be fully web based client. You can access the Market place for Dynamics AX Evaluation copy from this link. Have fun with the evaluation versions and make sure your Azure subscriptions don't burn up too quickly by turning off the VM's when not in use.

Easily move Retail Till Layouts between environments

Many of the times we would like to see the Till layout in our Live environment on our Testing instance. The usual way would be to replicate manually the changes on the Till layout designer one by one or move the complete transaction DB from Live to Testing instance. Both of which will give a lot of downtime or a bit cumbersome! A easy hack to replicate the details would be to just copy over all the relevant tables via SQL insert. I had went through the table relationships and have compiled the necessary ones which you can use for the copy functionality. The data for design is predominantly saved as XML data which is used by the .NET runtime on POS for building the layout or an activeX component for designer in AX which allows for layout changes. At no point you should manipulate the XML data directly as it can make the layout to crash, we need to allow the ActiveX designer to generate the XML data, that's one of the reasons you need to provide additional Read/Write permissions for AX database for the users who manage the Till Layout designs.
The list of tables that are involved in the Till Layouts are,

• RETAILBUTTONGRID
• RETAILBUTTONGRIDBUTTONS
• RETAILIMAGES
• RETAILTILLLAYOUT
• RETAILVISUALPROFILE
• RetailDeviceTypes
• RetailPOSTheme
• RetailTillLayoutZone
• RetailTillLayoutZoneReference

AX 2012 R2 has the first 5 tables as the remaining tables were included in R3 with the introduction of MPOS. And here is the sample SQL Select into statement, please make sure you've moved the records in Testing table to a backup table before executing the statement.

select * into [--TestInstance--].[dbo].[RETAILBUTTONGRID]

 from [--LiveInstance--].[dbo].[RETAILBUTTONGRID] 

Kindly test carefully and evaluate relationships of the tables to be sure there has not been any changes incorporated by Microsoft in version or hotfix changes.

Dynamics AX 2012 R3 CU9 Released

AX 2012 R3 CU9 is officially released with the KB3063879. The release has been positioned only for AX 2012 R3 hence it seems the previous releases for R1 and R2 will need to wait a bit longer. An attractive option for the CU9 release is if the existing environment is linked to LCS they you may upgrade it directly from LCS website. Here is the link to the actual release which has all the information and notes related to Installation guides and change history.