Previewing Next Week's Dynamics AX Technical Conference!

We're happy to welcome in one of our star Solution Architecht's, Lachlan Cash onto The Edge!  Here Lachlan gives us a preview of what to expect at next week's sold out AX Technical Conference.

Only one week to go before we kick off the first, sold-out Microsoft Dynamics AX Technical Conference 2011 in Redmond, Washington. When we started the planning for the event our desire was to give our partners a look at the upcoming release of Microsoft Dynamics AX so they can start to prepare their customer solutions. It's been amazing to see the response for this next release! I wish we hadn’t had to turn people away, but it's a fantastic indicator of the enthusiasm people have for the future when they are making the investment in this economic climate to travel and attend this event, take the knowledge back and grow their business around Microsoft Dynamics AX.

The Microsoft Dynamics Research &Development team has prepared some great content for this event covering 65 sessions, 20 chalk and talks, hands on labs and instructor led labs. Over three days we will explore the innovations as they will appeal to three different roles in the organization: developer, infrastructure consultant and functional consultant.

Let’s look at the developer. Innovation for this role starts with the unique model-driven, layered architecture. Developers attending the conference will be able to experience this in a number of ways. We have architecture sessions that will go into the philosophy behind the evolution of the architecture, the frameworks and concepts of the models. This will then expand into tooling sessions to show developers how we have evolved the application development lifecycle leveraging Visual Studio 2010 and the Visual Studio Team System to manage source code control and testing. What is unique is that we are exposing the same rich meta data in Visual Studio that MorphX developers have always had and continue to have. This allows existing developers to expand the types of solutions they are able to provide to customers.

Secondly let’s look at the infrastructure consultant. As Microsoft servers continue to evolve to give a customer expanded capabilities to meet their changing business needs, Microsoft Dynamics AX benefits from pre-built interoperability. Take for example the work we have done around Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. Customers benefit from the expanded access of information across the organization. With Microsoft Dynamics AX, we continue to innovate on this platform so that infrastructure consultants can easily plan technology investments and build their roadmap. Attendees can expect a number of sessions exploring how we leverage Microsoft technology to expand the reach of ERP to more people in the organization.

Thirdly functional consultants working with developers will see how pre-built adaptability in the application models allows industry and vertical solutions to be built quicker and better. Functional consultants will get insight into the innovation from an application point of view across Financials, Supply Chain, Manufacturing, Services, and Human Resources. We’ve been listening to our existing customers, and those looking to switch to Dynamics, understanding where they want to take their businesses and incorporating that feedback into the product.

Most of the functional sessions will be covered from the developer’s perspective as well. While we are adding new functionality we understand that the channel builds vertical solutions and tailors the application to their customers’ needs. We have been focusing on helping developers write better code and less code and this is reflected in how we have been improving the application models.

It will be a busy three days but an exciting time to catch up with customers and partners and spend some time talking about the ground-breaking innovations in Microsoft Dynamics AX. Yes it will be cold and rainy, but at least in Seattle, you know what you can depend on: rainy weather and fantastic software!