Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 is now live! You can download it from CustomerSource.

To help you get started, we’ve posted lots of new AX 2012 R3 content on TechNet and MSDN.

What’s new

A list of new and changed R3 features is here: What’s new in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3. You can drill into details for each specific feature. Our downloadable New, Changed and Deprecated Features book has been updated with the same information.

Note: What’s new topics are presented in chronological order, so look for links to AX 2012 R3 changes, or scroll to the bottom of topics.

R3 features and content for application users

We’re very excited about this release and all of the great new features for application users! These include, but are not limited to the following.

All sorts of new Retail functionality, including:

A redesigned loyalty program that enables you to easily build flexible loyalty offerings to reward your customers.
Product kits that enable you to take advantage of cost savings when selling bundled products.
Gift card enhancements that support electronic gift cards and intercompany gift card transactions
Pricing and discount enhancements, including support for affiliation discounts, threshold discounts, price group enhancements and category-based pricing.
Inventory was enhanced to better support cross-docking operations, buyer’s push and support for return locations when products are returned to different inventory locations.
Several additional enhancements were also made to support product, customer and transaction management.

For more information about these changes, see the section “What’s new for application users” in What’s new: Retail features: AX 2012 R3.

Retail essentials: A retail-centric configuration option for Microsoft Dynamics AX. Retail essentials provides a simplified, streamlined user experience that is optimized for organizations that use only the retail management functions of Microsoft Dynamics AX.

Call centers (stand-alone or as part of retail): Call center functionality includes features that are designed to make it easier to take phone orders and handle customer service throughout the order fulfillment process.

Warehouse management: The new Warehouse management module provides advanced supply chain management capabilities for distribution and order fulfillment for manufacturing, distribution, and retail companies.

The following are just some of the exciting new features:

Count and report the quantities of items in warehouse locations, and report the results by using a mobile device.
Streamline processes for receiving inbound items by using advanced shipping notices.
Print labels for items in the warehouse.
Use flexible templates to specify how to create work in the warehouse, and the locations to pick items from and put them away.
Specify when items are reserved in the ordering process by using reservation hierarchies.
Automate processes for containerization.

Transportation management: The Transportation management module, provides a broad range of features to manage transportation in manufacturing, distribution and retail companies. With R3, guidelines are available as online Help content that allow you to configure and get the full benefit of the new features.

Some of our favorite features in the new module include the following:

Rating functionality that enables you to configure rating structures and shop for shipping carrier rates based on charges, such as fuel and customs duties.
Routing features that enable you to configure complex transportation processes and determine carriers’ routes based on mode.
Freight bill reconciliation enables you to have freight bills automatically matched with invoices or to use manual reconciliation.
Appointment types and appointment notifications enable you to create an appointment schedule for a warehouse, and use it to send notifications for scheduled appointments.

Demand forecasting: A set of Master planning tools that enable you to estimate future demand and create demand forecasts based on historical transaction data.

R3 features and content for system administrators

Some of our favorite new admin-focused features include:

Deploying Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 on Azure using Lifecycle Services
Retail features, including:
- A new Point of Sale client that’s in beta: Modern POS
- Updates to make Commerce Data Exchange easier to manage
- New online stores
- Mass deployment of retail components
- New retail management pack for System Center
Support for R3 features in most Lifecycle Services tools (the rest will follow). For details, see What’s new: Lifecycle Services
Cloud-powered support: Azure VMs accessed through Lifecycle Services that you can use to reproduce issues and submit support cases.
The new R3 Update installer, which you can log in and download from Lifecycle Services. To help make the frequently-changing update process easier to navigate, we added a list of scenarios to the Apply updates to database, AOS, and clients topic.

And, as always, we’ve revised the installation and upgrade content for this version:

We’ve also updated some reference docs for R3, including Tables and Table groups. The related Excel spreadsheet now includes all tables, including the release in which they were added to the product.

R3 features and content for developers

The reference topics for X++ and .NET have been updated for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3. This update includes changes to thousands of topics.

Documentation for over 1900 Data upgrade scripts has also been updated for R3.

One new feature we like is that you can now store more than 16 dimensions in the InventDim table and its DimIdx index. For more information, see Walkthrough: More than 14 InventDim Dimensions Despite Index Limit.

Most of the new features for System Administrators listed above are also very helpful for developers: Check them out!