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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Microsoft Dynamics AX (Archived) / Re-implementation or u...
Microsoft Dynamics AX (Archived)

Re-implementation or upgrade to Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations

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Posted on by Sohaib Cheema 49,492 User Group Leader

One of our clients, is looking forward to move to D365 from AX2009. They have got very minimum customization. All customizations are kind of cosmetic changes. E.g. addition of new fields in existing tables and few new customized tables. They don’t have any critical customizations such as any customization in posting classes.

We are going through discussions of adopting a path for upgrade among following 2 approaches

  1. upgrade AX2009 code to AX2012 ; And then upgrade AX2012 MosdelStore to D365

    Or

  2. Re-implement/Redevelop customizations.

    I would be interested to hear stories of anyone who went through AX2009 to D365 upgrade. Any views in general will also be great to know.

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I have the same question (0)
  • Suggested answer
    Vilmos Kintera Profile Picture
    Vilmos Kintera 46,149 on at

    The biggest question is whether you want to carry forward historical data or not.

    If the answer is yes, you need to go through an AX 2009 -> AX 2012 R3 upgrade. The data upgrade tool came out I believe with the Spring release, there already is an article about that:

    [View:https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/unified-operations/dev-itpro/migration-upgrade/data-upgrade-2012:750:50]

    If you do not want to carry forward historical data and just want to make it available in the old application as read-only, I would go down the re-implementation path.

    With AX 2012 R3 the new WHS solution for warehousing came, which is very different from warehousing in AX 2009.

    In case you would like to use the new inventory dimensions (License Plates), advanced reservation and picking engine through location directives, the new warehouse devices, load planning / shipping etc. then you definitely need to do process changes and fit-gap for the customizations. That might again tilt you more towards doing it fresh in D365fF&O straight away, which has additional new features and improvements.

    Unfortunately a lot of things have been deprecated also in the new version, that is also something to consider when upgrading.

  • Suggested answer
    André Arnaud de Calavon Profile Picture
    André Arnaud de Cal... 301,411 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

    Hi Sohaib,

    To take advantage of all new features in D365, it would be better to go for a re-implementation. We did upgrade a customer from AX 2009 to D365 where we did look what was done in AX2009, but made almost all customizations obsolete by using standard features and a few add-ons.  

    If you want to migrate data, you can use the AX2009 migration tool or do it manually. We did prepare Excel sheets where the column names did match the data entity column names of D365. You can easily extend the existing entities with your new fields.

    It would save you from an additional step to migrate to AX2012 first with all kinds of hurdles and possible additional downtime when going live.

  • Suggested answer
    Faisal Fareed Profile Picture
    Faisal Fareed 10,796 User Group Leader on at

    Hi Sohaib,

    I would do re-implementation based on your scenario even with minimal customization are done in system. I have been doing an upgrade from AX 2009 to D365 for one of our customers, its actually not an upgrade rather a new implementation. Since I had to rewrite all customization taking advantage of new frameworks e.g. sysOperationFramework which were implemented using dialog class in V9.

    For data import from V9 to D365 I used data entities - The way I extracted data from V9 is; I exported SQL views as SQL script which were created for data entities in D365. I then ran SQL scripts in V9 database to create these views there and got data into an excel/csv file (this is a SQL feature). Imported this data back into D365 using entities.

  • Suggested answer
    Ajit Profile Picture
    Ajit 8,755 on at

    Dynamics 365 for Operations – Tech Talk: Migration tools

    www.youtube.com/watch

  • Sohaib Cheema Profile Picture
    Sohaib Cheema 49,492 User Group Leader on at

    Hi Guys,

    Thank you for response.

    I have done AX2012 to AX7 upgrades and 2012 in-place upgrades as well. I understand the pain of re-coding objects because with locking of application suite it would need to turn majority of things into extensions whereas on older versions those used to be as customization. I remember the time when its code name was AX7, it was an easy upgrade, because majority of suites were unlocked and customization was allowed in free way.

     

    2nd point which is making me to think is about huge change in application. AX2009 used to have > 2700 tables. This changed > 7000 tables in AX2012 and number kept on increasing. These figures simply show huge change in application. From EmplTable to HcmWorker and from a single InventTable to full product and information management module, database and schema has changed a lot over the years. So for sure there would be need to re-do customization at some level. I don’t think if all can happen without redoing code and everything automatically does not seems a case here.

     

    My purpose to come on open community was to listen some interesting stories and experience of people. As some colleagues are in very strong favour of upgrade instead of reimplementation. Personally I don’t mind adopting any path, but certainly I can see that from development point of view update will take more time than to implement. It’s because for every customization I will be popping up my supervisor to explain to me what it was and looking for any specs because without knowing things, it would impossible to rearrange that code.

     

    Looking forward for more stories and any views in general.

     

  • Ajit Profile Picture
    Ajit 8,755 on at

    I would go with reimplementation if customer is ok with open balances and orders.

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