Developers Gear Up for New, Improved Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 at Technical Conference

The Dynamics AX Technical Conference in Bellevue, Washington was all about the upcoming Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 release, and according to some alert attendee blogging, there is plenty to pay attention to, from architecture to development tools to BI to retail to single-instance/multi-company management to master planning and more. 

The event also included some frank talk on the software's less glamorous--but still important--details like fixing weaknesses from past releases, and why development teams should consider holding off on new UI customizations in AX 2012 given the future product direction.

From the Alan Flanders Dynamics AX Blog, we get some honest talk from Microsoft on how the BI story has evolved. He wrote that the Microsoft team acknowledged that, "AX out-of-the box BI in 2009 was awful (admitted by BI team). 2012 and now R2 BI is beautiful and fully usable toolset for a broad range of BI stories."

Casperkamal's Dynamics AX blog notes that Microsoft is recommending that development teams not make UI investment for the current release given the new "immersive touch UX" that will be run via internet connection - i.e., minimal local processing - that Microsoft says it will be rolling out in the next major release.  That new interface will be optimized for Windows 8, but will be intended for other devices as well.

According to Flanders, the Dynamics AX solution architect role is getting an improve AX 2012 training workshop approach with R2.  As he describes: "...