A Possible Dynamics AX Solution - with the Cloud

Alright,

As I talked about in my recent post, More Focus on the Cloud, I want to start showing how Dynamics AX 2009 and beyond can be used with the cloud, cloud services, cloud based applications and platforms.

To kick this off, I want to talk about a possibility that can be done today. So lets invent a company, called CompanyA. They already have Dynamics AX 2009 in place, and some integrations with Dynamics AX with other applications.

They are wanting though, to have a field service application for their field service agents. These agents are located all over the world, and sometimes are contract employees. They have a desired to have the Field Service mobile application to work directly with their instance of Dynamics AX. They want to be able to keep track of work done, by who, hours, operations performed, charges to the clients, ticket information, etc.

They don't want to open their network to the world, and don't really have a lot of internal staff to support hosting a web presence internally. They want to off load the hosting somewhere else.

Also they want to be able to push the data out in the cloud from AX for the field service agents to pick up when they can connect. Finally, they want to pull data from the cloud datasource, to get updates from the field service agents.

So with that said, lets look at this.:


This daigram shows Dynamics AX instance on the top part, with it's core business logic. Then you have AIF and the AIF generated .Net Services. These services live at the service layer, where some SSIS packages and custom .Net Services are used to perform some data extraction and loading for reporting into a datawarehouse possibly.

You have the Services layer acting as the bridge between the Dynamics AX On Premise solution, to the SQL Azure based Field Service Database.

With this option, which by the way can be done right now with the CTP version of SQL Azure, a very secure connection to the outside world, with limited and controlled interactions between Dynamics AX and the SQL Azure database takes place.

Next we have the Field Service Agents, that have a mobile based solution designed to connect to the SQL Azure database, when it can connect to the internet, to download specific information for that field service agent and to also upload updates from the field service agent.

So with this possible solution design, we can address the needs to the client, by making use of SQL Azure Cloud based database. And I point out again, this can be done right now with Dynamics AX 2009 and SQL Azure CTP.

Now to take some steps further, lets look at a diagram from MSDN.:


This image shows how a windows or web client, on-premise can be used and make use of the Windows Azure platform for SQL Azure and Application code that lives in the cloud.

That's all for now. More on this topic to come. If you have questions, issues, interests about seeing more of this. Drop me a comment on this post.

Till next time!




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