Main takeaways from MS Ignite Conference, Atlanta 2016

So, it’s been a week since one of the largest Ignite conferences took place in Atlanta. The Arbela team attending was great – including most of our senior tech resources – and we were able to experience the new format and get a lot of value from this conference first hand.

I will share our general experiences and key technology takeaways from the conference in this blog. Then, in the coming days and weeks, we will be posting more about what we learned at Ignite, specifically around Arbela’s main focus areas, Dynamics AX and Dynamics 365

Ignite – Atlanta – Sept 26-30 of 2016. We loved it!

It’s the first year since Microsoft split the old Convergence (which was really more of a sales event anyways, despite all the technical sessions there) into two separate conferences –Envision (business focused) and Ignite (deeply technical). We discovered that the Microsoft Dynamics AX technical community is represented by just a small number of participants and sessions, compared to the much larger group of Ninjas/Microsoft technologists in non-Dynamics ERP areas – which we had no real overlap with in the past… uh… dozen of years. But, nevertheless, just reviewing those 34 AX-related sessions (compared to the rest of 950 non-AX sessions), and finding a lot of familiar presenter names (hey, Robert, Milinda, Christian, Thomas, Arjit and other folks! Kirill – we missed you!) we decided to take a chance and try it by ourselves for the first time. And it was the best conference that I’ve personally attended so far.

Inside. Urgh, crowd, people are everywhere!

This was the first time I saw ALL 3 GWCC buildings open and CROWDED! I mean it – a lot of people everywhere! Lines everywhere – a line to the building, a line to a registration station, a line to a line to the escalator going down to the Expo Hall. And a lot of walking between Building A to Building B, back to A, then to C and back to B. Imagine this: 34 AX sessions and Microsoft still managed to put them in all 3 buildings…. Luckily I remembered the ‘secret’ short cut in Expo Hall B that connects A and C which reduced walking time from 15 minutes to 5.  Other conference experiences to note:

• New backpacks! I really like mine – and I will be using it more often than any other stuff MS has distributed at previous conferences.
• Boxed lunches – great idea – helped to manage all those thousands of hungry techies and reduce standing-in-line-getting-lunch time to a few minutes.
• Much better than what we had last February in Seattle for the Tech Conference.
• Multiple sessions were rescheduled or cancelled on Monday – but all was back to normal by the next day.
• Air Conditioners. On Thursday, somebody at GWCC decided to turn air conditioners from ‘meh’ to ‘freezing cold.’ We were happy for the hot coffee that day!

Main messages. Azure is awesome! Uh, I forgot to mention that Azure = awesome!

As the title clearly says: Azure, integrations, one solid picture and one solid story for all MS technologies that are finally being combined into one big monster and the name of it is…. Well, we still don’t know, as it is still early days for MS on this. But we clearly hear this: Azure is our future, IoT is too, Dynamics 365, everything connects to everything, one thing just naturally fulfills other things. All great news, especially compared with  even a year ago when we were struggling to get two MS technologies to team up and work together.

Digital transformation

Main headline. AI – main ambition of Microsoft. Ability to transform big data into intelligence. Investments into reinventing productivity and business processes. Connecting Office 365 and Dynamics 365 with intelligence.

4 big pillars of democratizing AI are:

• Agents (Cortana)
• Applications (Office 365 and Dynamics 365)
• Services (building blocks, multiple apps)
• Infrastructure (Azure)

The best message that Satya said during Innovate keynote was: we’ve been talking about and gathering gazillion bytes of data. Now let’s try to make sense out of it!

We will review more details and examine what this means to our small Dynamics world later in this blog. However, A LOT of changes are coming and it is changing out mindset and the way we’ve always used, implemented and looked at ERP systems.

Dynamics AX/Dynamics 365. New Era is coming…

When it comes to our main focus – Microsoft Dynamics AX (Microsoft Dynamics 365) – here are the main takeaways from the session. We will now be reviewing all main elements and areas going further.

Roadmap

• AX 2012 will be supported until 10/2021
• Update 3 is planned for fall – in one-two months.
• Update 3 will be called Dynamics 365
• Still no on premise history
• Min number of licenses is 20 for AX
• Data upgrade path: now only for 2009->AX7. Path 2012->AX7 will be released later
• Big focus on Data Visualization
• Integration with AX7 is now very simple – a lot of native out of box tools to make is smooth

ALM

• LCS is a primary portal for ALL AX7 envs
• Everything is done via LCS
• Updates, database move, issue search, incident reporting, etc
• BPM is a mandatory tool to capture all processes and move with process-driven implementations
• Task guides are used for ALL documentation, help
• Test automation is fully possible using task guides
• DSE – Dynamics Service Engineering – this is a team at Microsoft that is responsible for servicing all LCS AX7 requests

Mobility

• Two mobile solutions/frameworks for creating mobile apps for AX are being released
• PowerApp
• Simple and powerful solution for creating mobile apps, integrate with multiple systems without development, uses scripting language
• Mobile Experience Manager in AX7
• Native feature to turn ANY AX7 form into mobile-ready page

Integrations

• There are 2 native connectors now
• AX and CRM online connectors
• Allow to use for Azure logic apps, Flow, PowerApps, etc
• Microsoft Flow is used to build simple integrations as well
• CRM to AX integration is now out of box
• CDM – Common Data Model – allows us to build powerful data warehouses, get data from multiple systems into one Azure SQL database and build applications to consume it properly
• DIXF is the main framework for all integrations and data migration
• Entity stores are used for simple PowerBI integration and simple visualization of data – almost-real-time

Environment management

• Each customer is supplied with 3 envs with their license purchase
• 2-tiers PROD, 2-tiers TEST (to be used as UAT and CRP env, very close to PROD) and 1-tier DEV
• More images can be deployed by request (1-tier and 2-tier)
• Microsoft fully manages PROD and all 2-tiers TEST envs deployed within MS Azure subscription
• Partners/customers are responsible for managing 1-tier envs deployed on private Customers or Partners subscriptions
• Database move between env is done by Microsoft for ALL envs managed by MS automatically and MS has a whitepaper on how to move DBs between 1-tier envs
• LCS has a very powerful tool for Environment monitoring that shows ALL statistic per EACH user on how the system was used and what was the cause of the issue

Updates

• Platform in AX is now locked (not available for customization)
• All Platform updates happen AUTOMATICALLY – MS notifies customers about possible downtime and allows to select timeframe
• All application updates are still optional
• All updates are done via LCS
• Only roll-forward updates are supported now, but roll-back option will be released soon
• Data upgrade path from 2009 to AX7 is almost ready. Only after that MS will work on 2012->AX7 data upgrade path

PowerBI and Data warehouses

• Entity stores is the answer for BI integration
• Incremental update – handling large volume – is out of box now in AX
• Building custom data warehouses is easy now
• For more complex integrations where third party should be involved – use CDM and PowerApps

Thank you, stay hungry for further updates and see you at AXUG in Tampa next week and next year in Orlando for Ignite!

Created By: Viktor Lesiv, Director of Technology

Read more here: Viktor Lesiv’s blog

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