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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