A Microsoft Dynamics AX Integration Framework: Why AIF, Web Services, and Data Management (DIXF) are Not Enough

If you have concerns about how you are going to integrate to systems with the new Microsoft Dynamics AX (a.k.a., AX 7), you should have them. At this writing, Microsoft has indicated that integration will be performed using Web services and Data Management (formerly DIXF). These enabling technologies can move data into and out of Dynamics AX, but they are not complete, and they are not well suited to meet the requirements of a messaging interface.

We believe there is a complete misunderstanding within the community as to how limited these tools are for meeting a company's messaging integration needs, and how much effort this creates for partners. My concern is that users will need to invest a great deal of time and money to make up for this gap, and the varied approaches that users and partners develop will create new long-term issues for ownership of AX solutions.

The state of AX integration

Dynamics AX partners usually understand messaging, but this article will describe it for readers who are less familiar. Then we will explore the challenges of using Data Management and Web services versus a real integration framework.

Microsoft's Application Integration Framework (AIF) represented the first standard methodology for handling messages from Microsoft. It was cumbersome but more advanced users could make use out of it.

With Dynamics AX 7, AIF goes away. Microsoft offers two tools to replace it, being 1) Data Management and 2) web services. (More on those below.) Those tools cannot do the job as well as AIF.

We understand Microsoft's vision for data being more accessible to more objects. However, ...