The New Microsoft Dynamics AX for Retail: Streamlined Deployment, Richer Multichannel Experience

Retailers will find that the new Microsoft Dynamics AX features a number of changes and improvements over Dynamics AX 2012 that are of specific interest to them.

Rachel Profitt, director of the RSM Technology Academy with RSM US, a provider of audit, tax and consulting services for middle market organizations, provided an in-depth overview of those changes in a recent webinar, What's New in the New AX: What's New Retail for AXUG. She also spoke with MSDynamicsWorld.com.

Some of the changes introduced with the new Dynamics AX occur within the AX Retail and Commerce Module, while others involve the architecture and topology of AX (see figure). "Dynamics AX is now cloud-based, and hosted and deployed through Azure using the Lifecycle Services (LCS) tool set," Profitt says. That streamlines many functions, including a number of specific to retailing.

The previous version, Dynamics AX 2012, had "a lot more components, pieces, parts and connections," Profitt says. Each store location required a physical server connecting it to the company's headquarters.

With the new Dynamics AX, retailers no longer need to install a server at each site. Instead, a retail server communicates across a chain of stores. "It's much easier to get new stores up and running," Profitt says.

Another shift is the move to a single database. It used to be that each store within a chain would have its own retail database, along with a database at the company's headquarters. "Now, ...