Time to learn AX 2012.

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Hi,

I just wanted to know the following:

1. How much time it takes to learn AX 2012 Development so that one can start working on client customization and manage the development tasks?

2. How much time it takes to learn AX 2012 Functional Areas (only Finance) to a person who has no knowledge of ERP?

3. Do we require a Functional Area Consultant?

Thanks.

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Faisal Fareed 10,796 User Group Leader on at

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Hi Tauseef,

There is no hard and fast rule for learning, it really depends on someone how much he/she can absorb and how quickly he/she adopt things. There are some companies running online/on-premises development courses who guarantee you that they will tell you everything about development stuff in 3 months. In fact they will!!! but the point is what will you get from those trainings unless you start your own mind. Development is an art, its not a thing which someone can teach you.

For functional areas it again really depends on your knowledge, how much someone has spent time in field, learning curve. It may take 1 year to be a good functional consultant or may take more 10 years.

For gap analysis and map ERP with end users business, Functional consultant plays a vital role.

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Vilmos Kintera 46,149 on at

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It depends on the task, but typically it takes 3 years to get a good understanding in general of the modules and be able to start somewhere with majority of the development tasks. I have had one junior developer who learned AX so fast that he reached the 3-year mark in 6 months time pretty much, however he was very dedicated.

Financials is a very complex area, so you would only progress fast if you have past accounting/bookkeeping knowledge or some form of financials and business educational background, to have a rough idea on what is a Chart of Accounts with Main accounts in the Ledger and typically what goes where during different types of postings. If you do not have this background, again, it would be slower - talking about years.

As for recruitment, experienced functional consultants and developers are both required - juniors are not much. Typically customers want to get going fast with their implementations and they do not want a rookie nearby their precious systems. Partners tend to hire fresh people who have the potential, but that is a hit and miss usually, so they are also looking more for medium-tier resources.

Also worth noting that by the time someone would reach an acceptable level in the old product version, the product would already be starting to get phased out, so going for AX2012 is only a good idea if you stick with a customer that plans to use it for the next 5-6 years - otherwise stick with Dynamics 365 for Operations.

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Hi Faisal and Vilmos, Thanks a lot.

Its always nice to hear your opinions.

Yes definitely development (be it in any technology) depends on:

1. how much one wants to learn.

2. how quickly one understand things.

Actually, I am from Microsoft .NET background.

The place where I work may have some project on AX 2012 in near future.

But for now they don't have Customer Source or Partner Source access.

Also, there is nobody who knows about AX 2012 here.

They have asked me to explore AX 2012.

From previous 2 months, I am exploring and trying to learn AX (more from the development area perspective but not much from the functional area side).

And I feel I am on the right track.

And pretty confident of what I have explored so far.

It's been great.

I know there is lot more which I have to look.

And there will be lot more when I will actually start working on it.

So was curious to know about how much time it takes to get familiar with Development in AX 2012?

And regarding the Functional Side I think we will require a Functional Area Consultant whenever we get the project.

Also as a developer, how much knowledge I should have of the functional areas?

Thanks.

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Faisal Fareed 10,796 User Group Leader on at

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Hi Mohammad,

Being a .Net developer with hands on experience I think you should pick things quickly and we are always here to help you. I would suggest to first explore few development basics from AX books (There are many free books available online, if you don't find I can share with your few). These books will at least give you the path what is there in AX and what you have to do to explore few important topics. Explore AX frameworks say Batch, Number sequence, source document, Workflow, AIF etc.

Also based on your previous .net experience try to build something on your own in VM - you can take ideas from your .net products.

Regards to functional knowledge don't worry about this one at this stage you will get it with time while exploring things for development.

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Vilmos Kintera 46,149 on at

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You would have to know the main modules on a high level, then when something goes wrong or a larger implementation is required, you'd need to dig in deeper anyways.

Solo learning is not really advised, you do need instructor-lead courses otherwise you will have trouble to get the big picture of why an integrated ERP is called integrated. Changing one thing here will have an impact there, which you will not necessarily notice or realise if you do not have the knowledge and experience.

There are some good learning materials and books out there from which you could start, but once you get some general grasp of the modules and the developer UI, you should definitely take some courses or get involved with an actual implementation.

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Thanks Faisal and Vilmos.

Yes, I would love to have some books that you can refer Faisal.

Few things which I am currently focusing on includes:

1. Basics of X++ language.

2. Understanding different environments in AX 2012 (Dev, Test, Stag and Prod).

3. Integrating TFS (or rather VSTS) in AX 2012 (shared work space for every developer).

4. Understanding model and model store files to move changes from one environment to another.

As I already said there is still lot to learn and explore.

Also so rightly said by Faisal "We are always here to help you".

From day one of my exploration I turned to this community for every query that I had and got a lot more than expected.

Thank you all.

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