AX 2009 Update: At Convergence Sessions, Dynamics Team Pushes Improved User Experience, Upgrade Path

Dynamics AX 2009 is being pushed as a release with a lot of everything-more features, better performance, better usability, and better alignment to Microsoft's "Software + Service" model.

"It is groundbreaking," said Thomas Mullertz, director of AX/NAV Product Marketing, at Convergence 2008.

There are several concrete examples of improved features and usabilty - new Role Centers for role-tailored views of the software, new language support, and new features. Other aspects, though, like deep integration to CRM Live, or "cloud" services, are still not fully realized and may be more evident in other Dynamics products before AX adopts them, AX officials indicated in presentations and interviews at Convergence 2008.

Companies that have been testing AX 2009 since last fall have had positive things to say. The controller of show-tune licenser, Rodgers & Hammerstein, John Elmer, told a Convergence press briefing that he's "had fantastic results" testing AX 2009. "When we put our employees in front of AX 2009, everything looked very familiar to them," based both on its similar look to Office 2007, and their experiences working with AX 3.0 over the last few years.

Rodgers & Hammerstein primarily licenses its famous show tunes, and "in my world, finance is critical," said Elmer. "It's IP stuff that people want to happen easily."

The company expects to complete upgrading of the entire company to AX 2009 by the end of this month (March).

Wednesday's Dynamics AX General Session, led by Keels Hertogh, Director of AX Global Product Management, began with a light-hearted take on customer pain points - a video described a fictional initiative that sent painful physical punishments to the desks of the Microsoft employees responsible for their particular software bugs. Getting down to business, the stated vision for ...