My report from the technical conference.

Our first session on the second day, Wednesday February 24, 2016 was a general session, this time with Mike Ehrenberg, Technical Fellow, Microsoft Corporation.

It was cool to get the technical point of view; this was, after, all, called a technical conference. Although there were LOTS of functional breakout sessions.

Mike emphasized that AX is cloud first and optimized for Azure.

The mission statement is:

To empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more          

• Create more personal computing
• Reinvent productivity and business processes
• Build the intelligent cloud

He promised that coming soon would be upgrade and migration story. He pointed us to Channel 9 videos for more information. He showed us that Microsoft reinvented the experience, for a reinvented product. There was a lot of emphasis on how the whole user experience is different.

One way is a brand new trial experience. A potential customer who is interested in AX can spin up (have a partner spin up?) a trial box in LCS, just like how we currently spin up development and build boxes.

LCS is still the order of the day – it was recommended in AX 2012 and it’s required now.

The new Dynamics AX: What comes next?

• Customer learnings
• Automate everything
• Performance, scale, reliability and COGS (cost of operating a service)
• Service best practices and certifications
• Customize through configuration, not code
• Workload deployment and implementation
• Systems of intelligence

Takeaway? This is the start of the next generation.

There was a Q&A:

Q: What is the current and ongoing role of the partner?
A: We are taking some of the partner work to let them focus on productivity / business value

Q: Integration with CRM

A: Totally new approach to integration shipped with 1700 data entities out of the box. Service industries: different approach. Employee self service and manager self service (HR) are much better now

Q: Upgrade from 2009, 2012

A: 2012 upgrade has code tools, second half of this year

2009 migration – the approach is a new implementation

The base for the new AX is the latest 2012. The schema is very consistent. We will provide tools for data.

Q: huge investment in own data center

A: Windows server 2016, SQL server 2016, Azure stack

– shoutout to the guy who sat behind me in this session – I hope that an energetic toddler with restless leg syndrome sat behind you on the flight home! –

This is the start of the next generation.

Happy DAXing!