Evolution of Microsoft Dynamics - Axapta To D365
Microsoft Axapta
Originally developed as a collaboration between IBM and Danish Damgaard
Data in the late 90s, Damgaard then merged with Navision Software in 2000
forming NavisionDamgaard, and ultimately being acquired by Microsoft in
2002.
At time of Microsoft acquisition 'Axapta' contained 19 core modules
consisting of General Ledger, Bank Management, Customer Relationship
Management (CRM), Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Inventory
Management, Master Planning, and Production.
From a development perspective Axapta featured an embedded IDE
(Integrated Development Environment) called MorphX similar to the popular
Microsoft Visual Studio development suite as well as having its own
proprietary development language X++. Microsoft Axapta stood out
compared to other ERP applications with its ease of customization and full
featured IDE that complimented the object-oriented Java-like programming
language. When compared to the development environment of an Oracle
E-Business Suite, Axapta provided the developer one language to master
where as in an Oracle implementation a developer needed to maintain Java,
PL/SQL, and Shell scripting expertise. Axapta was one of the first
applications to not only feature but embed what is now known as an
object-relational mapping (ORM) framework, where database objects are
represented as first-class citizens or programmable objects within the
development environment. It has been rumored that this initial ORM
approach was what led to the creation of the ever so powerful Language
Integrated Query (LINQ) technology that Microsoft introduced in .NET
Framework 3.5.
Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0
Released in mid-2006, Axapta was now re-branded and brought into the
Microsoft Dynamics family of business applications under the Microsoft
Dynamics AX 4.0 name. While the core foundation stayed primarily the
same, the user interface was updated to adopt the accordion navigation
menu similar to what was found in Microsoft Outlook, essentially Microsoft
applied some "lipstick on a pig" aesthetics to modernize the
application. The features added were enough to start standing
Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0 up alongside other tier 1 ERP vendor
offerings from Oracle and SAP, these features included: integrated support
for radio frequency (RFID), web services for integrating with customers
and partners, alert trigger mechanism for informing users of real-time
transactions, RSS feed generation, and new role-based features that
provide individuals with direct access to the most relevant,
business-critical information.
Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009
Released in mid-2008, the product was once again renamed with a year
suffix becoming Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009, Microsoft once again got their
lipstick out and dressed up the swine this time introducing an enhanced
user interface that introduced a navigation bar, area pages, and list
pages that was similar to the Microsoft Office user experience that
provided additional insights and data visualizations. Additionally, a
'Role Center' option was included allowing real-time information and
associated tasks to be prioritized and worked accordingly, a new concept
was included in the 'Compliance Center' providing a centralization view of
internal controls, key performance indicators (KPIs), and other compliance
data. New module functionality was introduced to facilitate
procurement processes (requisitions, purchase orders) coupled with
integrated support of Windows Workflow Foundation to provide for business
level approvals. In order to support the workflow approvals, a
revamped organization hierarchy was included to setup and manage how
departments and people are related amongst each other. From a
technical/development perspective a new class structure 'Unit of Work'
concept was included, this facility allows the creation of records, update
and delete operations without worrying about the order of those and
without the need to specify surrogate key values as it will all be
performed automatically in the kernel. The 2009 release was touted
as a major release with key investments on the development side that saw
other Microsoft technologies incorporated into the product such as:
SSAS/SSRS reporting, aforementioned role centers based on Sharepoint, X++
supporting SQL statements, much needed load balancing optimizations, and
finally from a code administration standpoint version control.
Microsoft Dynamics 2012
Released in September 2011, this release was to be considered the first
to really feature Microsoft's vision as a large portion of the underlying
foundation was overhauled. Microsoft once again got their lipstick out and dressed up the swine this
time introducing an enhanced user interface that incorporated the
Microsoft Office ribbon bar to provide additional insights and data
visualizations. The user experience saw many new features most notably the
ribbon menu, action panes, fact boxes, and bringing SSRS reporting to more
of the forefront. Licensing models were revisited, allowing for users to
be licensed based on their security access level instead of by module,
this allowed customers to easily adapt to changes in their organization in
real-time and accommodate their users on a more tactical level.
On the technical side, code was now running in .Net which provided
significant performance improvements and the development environment was
now more isolated from the main application. Customizations became
significantly less invasive with the introduction of the event programming
model, that allowed multiple events to be chained together leaving core
Microsoft supported code untouched.
Microsoft D365 Finance & Operations
Released in November of 2016 and rebranded Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance
& Operations, often times abbreviated as D365, saw a move to a
cloud-first and/or cloud recommended approach to ERP. While functionally
similar to the previous version, this version features predominantly
infrastructure changes as it now sees Microsoft Azure as the hosting
provider allowing organizations to get out of the datacenter business and
let Microsoft handle the ERP workloads.
Customization of D365 is now radically different and debatable on whether
this is an improvement as organizations can no longer deploy changes on
the fly and now have to schedule downtime for packages to be deployed. A
new extensibility model is now introduced in favor of the previous
over-layering concept, with extensibility the core code of the ERP system
is no longer available for customizations as developers must customize the
software through pre-determined extension events or insertion
points.
Upgrading the ERP system is now vastly different and introduces a new
rigid and unforgiving release schedule, customers will be beholden to
Microsoft's release schedule and be forced to test their implementations
on their own as Microsoft will only support a few versions off from the
current.
While the underlying functionality has minor changes the user experience
and interface is quite different, with D365 the application is browser
based with a look and feel that is similar to other Microsoft products
mostly following in the likes of Office 365.
The developer experience is completely overhauled as well with the
familiar objects found in the Application Object Tree (AOT) now being
incorporated into Microsoft Visual Studio. While Visual Studio is
common to the traditional Microsoft developer, when it comes to agility,
what used to take hours to develop, test, and deploy on previous versions
now takes days and involves multiple resources as part of segregation of
duties requirements.
As it is typical with all cloud-based products, administration and
performance are now micro-managed by Microsoft resources making visibility
and ease to troubleshoot problems ever more "cloudy".
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