My notes on Dynamics AX 2012 R3 Pre-Release Event at Melbourne

Dear Friends!

Greetings, It's been a while doing some posting here.  Had been super busy. But I took some time to attend this event and thought to share some notes here.

Couple of days ago I went to attend the pre-release launch of Dynamics AX 2012 R3 here in Melbourne. Last year, Microsoft had a similar launch for R2, but it was not a full packed one. this year I was surprised to see almost more than 100 people turned up for the launch so I believe all are as excited as I am :)

I should have gone the social media way but preferred dotting some quick notes the traditional way on my laptop while the events were taking place

All in All, it was a good 2 hours event and we got to hear from Christian Pederson (General Manager of Dynamics at Microsoft)

Some of the keynotes were:

1/ The 4 Upcoming growth trends: a. Cloud Computing, b. Social media c. Mobility and d. Big Data

2/ A demo was shown on how Lotus F1 were taking advantage of Dynamics AX 2012 R3 to improve their overall factory processes in manufacturing race cars. It was good to get some knowledge on the business about how they change the car designs for each race lap, and how the computations and strategies are fed into Azure and Dynamics and ultimately how they got a better ROI

3/ Also an example was discussed about Delta airlines and how they are leveraging Dynamics AX 2012 R3 where flight attendants have windows mobile devices to take the requests and how every thing is integrated using Azure and Dynamics AX

4/ The key message was how Dynamics AX 2012 R3 can deliver amazing customer experiences through Engagement with the customer, Running Operations and finally Expansion

5/ There was an interesting note on how AX 2012 R3 + Big Data will influence the customer and Big Data is not all about external data but how we can leverage the technology for data generated internally within the organization as well

6/ There was a talk about how the future releases of Dynamics AX will come up with out of the box tools for Big Data reporting

7/ The key deliverable in R3 as what I understand from the demo is all about mobility and mobile apps. Microsoft demoed some of the out of the box apps for Expense Reporting and Shop Floor Tracking. Microsoft is encouraging to design and develop more and more mobile apps as this is where the next boom is

8/ Also another key deliverable is about the LifeCycle Services i.e. how the Project Manager, Business Analyst, Developer, Administrator can benefit from this new set of tools. For me, specifically I was interested in the System Diagnostics, Usage Profiler, Infrastructure Estimation, License Estimator tools and how they work together

9/ There was an interesting question from an audience re. the change in data model in R3 to which Microsoft confirmed there's no significant change in data model or structure in R3

To conclude, Dynamics AX 2012 R3 will be a big release in terms of development of mobile apps, Azure Deployment, Lifecycle services

I'm all excited and looking forward for the release happening in May 2014.