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Retail Website - from Linux to Dynamics AX?

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Posted on by Paul Newman

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Retail Website - from Linux to Dynamics AX?

Greetings from Johannesburg, South Africa!

My customer currently uses a hosted Linux-based eCommerce solution (OpenCart, PHP, MySQL) which refreshes pertinent data from Dynamics AX on the hour via a script. The systems works very well.

Since they have Dynamics AX 2012, they want to know what benefits they would enjoy if they migrate the website to a Dynamics AX eCommerce solution?

Furthermore, I have the following questions:

(1) With the switch to Windows Server website hosting, what are the CPU, RAM & disk requirements for Dynamics AX (or whatever the relevant eCommerce solution is called)?

(2) How easy or hard is it to customize the CSS & HTML look and feel of the new system?

(3) Does the solution provide a shopping cart?

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

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SergeyP 2,928 on at

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1) Please CTRL+F here (technet.microsoft.com/.../jj991927.aspx) for

16 GB of RAM

and you will find hardware requirements

2) For customization have a look here:

a) Customize the appearance and behavior of site pages (technet.microsoft.com/.../dn151160.aspx)

b) Customize master pages (technet.microsoft.com/.../dn151159.aspx)

c) Customize page layouts (technet.microsoft.com/.../dn151158.aspx)

d) Look at left navigational pane (while browsing the links above) and you will find more articles, if something is still not clear - please ask

3) Yes, the solution provides a shopping cart.

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Greeting to Jozi. Must be getting cold there this time of year!

I suppose one of the main benefits of switching from your Linux e commerce solution would be that whenever an upgrade occurs or a new cumulative update is loaded there is less chance that the Linux ecommerce system needs to change.

AX sometimes significantly changes tables and data structures. As when 2012 came out, the General Ledger Dimension tables were significantly different to 2012. So if future versions of AX change tables, there is the potential it will break your Linux implementation. Add that to the fact that it's not officially supported by Microsoft, you don't get CU's fixing common issues.

Microsoft will probably also mention speed improvements, but I doubt it will be significant. They've made fairly rapid advances on the retail side and it really looks good.

My suggestion would be to run it in a test environment and see if it's actually market ready compared to your current solution.

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Paul Newman 195 on at

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Yes, cold here in Joburg but winter is alarmingly impotent (or just late) this year. Perhaps some brutal winter cold will still shock us later!

Thanks to all for your respective answers and links to other resources!

So far I have not yet found compelling arguments to sell me on switching to a SharePoint website that is fully integrated with Dynamics AX.

When weighing up the actual costs of deploying, hosting and managing a SharePoint public facing retail website when compared to doing the same on a Linux platform using straightforward HTML, CSS, MySQL and PHP (which also allows a connection to a Dynamics AX back-end) the case in favour of a Dynamics AX retail site is not clear at all.

Not only are the minimum server requirements orders of magnitude greater, the personnel expertise and costs also appear to be greater.

The existing Linux served website with PHP connections to Dynamics AX seems to be a really efficient "best of both" solution, even though those links may require infrequent maintenance (current links PHP to AX links have been running rock solid for nearly a year).

Of course I may be missing some really compelling arguments in favour of a SharePoint & Dynamics AX website, so please do feel free to provide more input.

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