How To Minimize Disruption When Upgrading Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012: The Right Steps and New Tools

If you're planning to upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, you know that it's imperative that you minimize the business disruption for your users.

Microsoft also realized that so it offers business a new tools and techniques for upgrading to Dynamics AX 2012 that significantly reduce that downtime during the upgrade process. And shorter downtime means less impact on your business.

At a recent online meeting of the Dynamics AX User Group, Kevin Kidder, Principal Escalation Engineer at Microsoft, shared some insights into why the upgrade framework for Dynamics AX 2012 is such a breakthrough. And while there's really no "silver bullet" that can identify all upgrade issues before you actually run the upgrade, there are a lot of tools that Microsoft has put in to help you identify those issues to help you upgrade the Dynamics AX code with the least amount of disruption to your business.

Upgrade the code

When it comes to an upgrade, the code upgrade has to happen first, Kidder said.

"[Developers need to look at] exactly what pieces of the customization they need to move forward on, how to start resolving the code conflicts that are there when you move the code customizations up to the new version, and try to compile those," he said.

You also have to upgrade the data that's related to the customizations that you have in the system and do database mapping to take the table name and field name information from your previous version and making sure they all have a place to go inside the new version, Kidder said.

"With Dynamics AX 2012 we tried to introduce a ...