Coming up the latest on business applications.
Especially Enterprise Resource Planning in the cloud with Microsoft Dynamics AX.
Were going to take a look at the latest user productivity updates including the new user interface.
New experiences such as workspaces and task guides
And, real-time and also interactive insights with Power BI.
Keep watching, because if your in IT we're going to take a look at
Native integration with Visual Studio
and how data management gets even easier.
Microsoft Mechanics
I'm joined today by Sri Srinivasan, general manager of the Dynamics AX platform team. Welcome.
Great to be here.
We've seen some huge improvements with Dynamics AX recently releasing
but, what's been your focus?
Our focus has been getting Microsoft Dynamics AX and its functionality to the cloud.
We are proud to bring amazing user experiences today.
And, at the heartbeat of any organization is business process.
Our focus has been speeding up businesses.
So what's new in this release?
Dynamics AX is powered by the cloud.
With Dynamics AX 2012 we built a lot of industrial functonality
The industrial functionality around retail, distribution
professional services and manufacturing is brought together in this new cloud experience.
It's further amplified by the Azure tooling
around Big Data, Machine Learning, modern experiences
embedded analytics and real-time capabilities that basically power that user experience.
Not only that, we have an extensibility platform
Which today brings together close to fifty ISV's
that ship with us on the Azure market place
to get deployed to the Azure market place.
And, as you can see
not only do we have these great organizations available for you to deploy.
We have another 200 waiting to jump on the bandwagon.
So we're super excited about bringing them on.
So, you've mentioned modern user experience a couple of times, can we see what that looks like?
Absolutely, lets jump right into one of the modern user experiences.
It is a beautiful HTML5 cross device.
Cross browser experience that's composed of a number of icons.
Each of these icons represents a workspace.
A workspace is an aggregation of tasks that an end user has to perform.
And, lets scroll into one of these workspaces.
The one that's called Sales Order Processing and inquiry.
It is an end user who processes sales orders.
As you can see he has pretty much all the information they need to perform actions.
Including unconfirmed sales orders.
Delayed sales orders.
Things that are partially shipped.
They have all the information they need to perform their daily task.
Not only that.
I'm showing you a Reservation Management canvas
where it shows current rentals and overdue rentals as tiles.
That information is also shown in grid format.
And, as I scroll this window
you will see analytics powered by In-Memory or Power BI show up.
So this Analytics is ready and available for the Reservation clerk.
They know which vehicles are earning them the most.
Which vehicles are pending rental and which vehicles are not getting picked up by organizations.
So the business process gets optimized.
It's great to see the Power BI being pulled right into context
so you can see the grid and the tiles from Power BI right there within Dynamics AX.
But, what if I'm new?
What If I've just started my role?
You've done some work there around making it easier to get started.
Yeah, we've talked about the concept of task guides.
So let's jump right into one these.
on the far right, you see a series of steps.
It's a task guide.
Normally, in an organization you see it as a document.
It's an imbedded document.
Think of it as training wheels for an end user.
So I start this task guide.
Immediately it pops up the first set of instructions.
It basically says to go to a particular location.
It's asking me to go to Accounts Receivable, which I should dutifully do here.
I click on All Sales Orders, it gives me the next set of instructions.
It makes a nice wiggle to show that you've done the right thing.
I click New and it's going to give me my next instructions which is to pick a customer.
So I hit the drop down, I pick Contoso San Diego.
It goes right next to hit OK.
So do you get the concept?
The concept is, I record a series of steps as an IT pro.
I replay them for my end user to consume my business applications on a much easier scale.
Very easy to get started.
I came from a background of building these types of apps out.
I know a lot of companies don't just start with the default settings
for maybe your sales flow that you just showed there.
How would I actually start customizing that?
Absolutely, so let's start with lifecycle services first.
For an IT pro, it's important to have a good deployment experience
to have all the systems needed to develop easily
to configure easily
to make that business applications so much more consumable.
What we are going to start with is Life Cycle Services
which is a cloud-based services that encompasses
project management, environment management, and health management of systems.
What you are seeing here is a methodology for running your project.
A set of environments that are ready and available.
Let's create one environment here.
So, I'm going to create a dev test environment in Azure.
It's called develop. I pick a configuration in Central U.S.
and I easily quickly specify how many build boxes I need.
What configuration of build boxes?
How many developer boxes I need?
I already pre-provisioned some of these environments.
So, let's go right into a dev test environment.
Here, with all the information available for me to start my development work.
Which makes it easy.
I'm going to RDP by clicking into one of those developer boxes.
Right.
That has been pre-provisioned for me.
It's straight from the portal and gives you a link and this downloads that RDP file?
I click OK.
I will go into my Visual Studio configuration experiences in IT Pro.
So this dev test environment already has even the dev tools loaded in it, so you can start building solutions?
Absolutely.
It has all the Azure tools you need to build an IT configuration.
So, right here I'm in Visual Studio.
I'm going to pick one of those user experiences.
Let's say you know the form that models Windows.
I'm going to open it up here.
And, in a beautiful Wiziwig experience, that form will light up for you.
It's not only code management, it's also see it as you build.
So, if I for example click on Vendor Account
it'll go right into the metadata for it.
If I switch it to say registration number
it should switch it to information for registration numbers.
So, I know where I am
as it relates to both the user experience as well as the metadata at all times.
I can look at my own configurations that I have done by just typing SQL
and on top it shows me highlighted where the changes are and it helps me.
And, do you remember the task guide experience?
Yeah.
We can create those and we can take those task guides and import them as XML.
And, make them a test script that will run in VSDS
and it becomes part of your regression suites
so that your solution is whole at all times as you configure and build.
Really great news from an IT pro standpoint.
Not only is it provisioned to fully work the environment with all the machines and all the services I need.
But, it's also enabled test automation using those task guides that we saw earlier.
OK, so now we've got our environment and we've get the empty vessel so to speak.
How do I get my data into that new dev test environment?
Most organizations have this problem of data quality.
So we've invested ourselves quite a bit.
Let's just jump right in.
Here's a company called ABC2.
I'm in the All Customers page and you see there are no customers.
What I'm going to do is I have a data package, customers is one part of it.
There is an Excel spreadsheet of customers.
Let's look at the process of bringing these customers into AX, OK?
So I'm going switch as an IT Pro into one of their Data Management workspaces.
The workspace I live in has an IT Pro.
I'm going to import data in here, let's call it ABC3.
It's a package of information that I have pre-created for this company.
Let's look at customers in particular.
It's created a visual map for you
off that Excel map to customers in AX.
So it's a beautiful visual map.
As an IT Pro all you have to do
for example if I have to make changes here, I click on this
and I drag and drop and manage my mappings.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to start the import of this data into AX.
And, It starts the import process.
In here, you get a nice visual of the progress while it's importing that data.
We saw earlier even the relationship mapping already done.
Yes, you get a nice visual as the data gets loaded
and as you can see the load is complete.
All the records are inserted and it gives me a nice visual for completion.
What I'm going to do is go back into All Customers, remember?
And see if the data is now available for me to transact.
As you can see, the data in the spreadsheet is ready and available
for the business process to consume.
So, one of the things I remember from working on ERP is really the data cleansing
to get some of my older data into the newer solution.
Have you made that better?
Absolutely, so right in that data management workspace
we've built in data quality services
which allow us to do simple things like side-by-side comparisons.
On the left side I have the staging data, which you saw in that spreadsheet in a grid format.
And it has some amount of validation, so there are no errors in the staging data and the excel data itself.
On the right side you have data in the customer table itself.
This is a customer entity we are talking about.
So I can switch from one customer to the other
and as you can see it toggles
and you can do a side-by-side comparison to make sure your data looks right.
In today's world, what ends up happening is this data is cleansed by consultants
using scripts and using Excel.
What we are doing now with these two sets is providing power to the IT Pro
to manage the data cleansing process through user experience
through validation embedded in the application itself.
Quite powerful.
It's really great to see all the different advancements and the culmination of all the cloud technologies
making data management easier and the user experiences.
But, where is this all going?
Yeah, super excited about this release.
And, it's a journey.
we are in an age of continuous learning.
Continuous learning through telemetry, through usage and basically having that usage drive
our priorities and making better productive experiences for end users
and tools for IT Pros to make their lives so much easier.
It's really great seeing all these updates.
And of course if you won't learn more about Dynamics AX, check out the link below.
That's about all the time we have for today's show.
But of course, if you want to keep up to date with the latest technologies from Microsoft
keep tuning into Microsoft Mechanics.
Thanks for watching and goodbye for now.
Microsoft Mechanics
www.microsoft.com/mechanics