Microsoft's Cloud Portal

For a few years now, I have had post on and off talking about cloud computing. How it's going to change a lot of things. Then we started hearing more and more about Microsoft's vision of the cloud, cloud computing, Software+Services, "Three Screens and a Cloud."

Then at the start of this year, I posted the following entry.:
What can the Cloud offer you in 2010?

Where in that post, I talk about 2010 being the year of the cloud. Now it's finally here, and ready. Microsoft's got a whole host of Cloud services, and some have already been in the Cloud for years. Think about Hotmail, for example, their oldest cloud app really. I mean it's for sure fits the bill for what a Cloud App is. That's been up for nearly 15 years!

Now we have Office 2010 coming out, and their will be Office Web Apps released with it. A Cloud based version of office, to launch and go where you please. Then of course the new kids on the Microsoft cloud block is Windows Azure and SQL Azure. Two, if you will, 'Pure Cloud Platforms & Services'.

Microsoft also recently released their cloud portal, which can be found here.: Microsoft's Cloud Portal - Were All in!



Also posted on this, is Steve Ballmer's video of his speech yesterday to UW crowd. In this he is quoted in saying.: "The cloud fuels Microsoft, and Microsoft fuels the cloud." - Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft.

The video is high level, but it should help bring into light that Microsoft has been in the cloud for years. And the approach, with familiar products and technologies, the lines between cloud and on-premise, that the Software+Serrvices visison brings will continue to blur for the end users. Which means more flexibility and possibilities for Companies and their Technology staffs to solve the business needs each of them have.

This directly links to Microsoft Dynamics AX. The cloud is here, and solutions can be designed and developed that include Exchange in the Cloud, SharePoint in the Cloud, Office Web Apps, .Net Cloud Based Services that run on Windows Azure and SQL Azure, and Dynamics AX at the heart of the business, being it's ERP / SCM platform.

I recommend checking out the new Microsoft Cloud portal, and adding it to your thought processes. How can these technologies be used by my clients, by me, to help my clients solve real world business problems. And if your and end customer, you should be asking your VAR / ISV to help you with designing and planning of your solutions, and how Cloud Apps, and Pure Cloud Services can be used to help you be more Dynamic, more flexible, and get things done, better, faster, cheaper.





"Visit the Dynamics AX Community Page today!"

SQL Server 2008 R2, PowerPivot - BI for the Masses

With the year closing out fast, I thought I would point out some recent published articles, across the Microsoft Universe focusing on SQL Server 2008 R2, specifically in regard to enabling the 'BI For the Masses'.

Recently, I posted the following.:
Microsoft PowerPivot - On the way, and use with AX

In this post, I talked about Microsoft PowerPivot, the new technology that is going to be released with SQL Server 2008 R2. This mixed with Office, including SharePoint 2010, will truly start to enable Microsoft's vision of 'BI for the masses'.

Some recent articles were posted, covering PowerPivot, from different points of view. The first is from RCPMag.com, with the following post.:
SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP is Feature-Complete

In the above article, PowerPivot is one of the topics covered, being that SQL Server 2008 R2 is the foundation technology that enables this. From the article.:
"The November CTP of SQL Server 2008 R2 offers the first preview of Microsoft's new PowerPivot technology (formerly code-named "Project Gemini") and allows BI data collected from it to be shared to the company's SharePoint Server.

PowerPivot is designed to let business users create their own BI solutions in Excel with a new in-memory analysis engine that Microsoft says will work on millions of rows of data. "Users can manipulate the data in new ways to create BI solutions and then publish them to SharePoint to collaborate with other users," explains Fausto Ibarra, Microsoft's director of SQL Server product management."

Next, the MSDN - The Architecture Journal, did a very focused and detail article about PowerPivot, and the technologies that enable it. The post.:
Increasing Productivity by Empowering Business Users with Self-Serve BI



From the article.:
"When it comes to BI, there is a constant battle between business users and IT. Business users know the functional components of the business; they understand fully what they want to analyze and the questions that they want to answer. The IT team understands the structure of the data, the models, the cubes, data flow from the operational systems, the data warehouse, and the control mechanisms for the data. Business users often feel that IT is always saying “No” when they make a request for a data cube, report, chart, graph, or even raw data. The members of the IT team often feel that users are making unreasonable requests, with timelines that equate to boiling the ocean by first thing tomorrow morning. Self-serve BI attempts to solve this problem by providing a mechanism that will satisfy the analytical needs of users and provide the governance and control that IT requires.

In its latest release of Office Excel 2010 and Office SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft attempts to provide the self-serve analytical needs of business users in a feature that is known as PowerPivot."

And...
"PowerPivot for Office SharePoint accomplishes two important tasks. The first is that it provides a home for the PowerPivot documents that users create in an environment that IT controls. The second is that it provides users throughout the organization the ability to view and interact with PowerPivot documents by using nothing more than their thin-client Web browser.

For business users, consuming a PowerPivot document is as simple as going to their Intranet site and clicking a document. The document then renders in their browser, and they can interact with the document and perform their analysis. In fact, the consumers do not even need to have Office Excel installed on their local computers to interact with the PowerPivot document. The result is that business users focus on their business analysis and are oblivious to the technology that enables the interaction."

As well as...
"Office Excel documents in Office SharePoint can use connection files that are managed by the IT department. For example, IT can create connection files to the source systems and then simply point end users to these approved connection files. This alleviates the need for IT to service numerous requests for connection information for every Office Excel file that is created for a business problem.

One of the most powerful features of Office SharePoint is called Excel Services. Excel Services is the ability to render Office Excel documents in a thin client (Web browser). An important Office Excel document can be saved to a document library, and the entire organization can then view and interact with the Office Excel document without having to leave their browser. The consumers of the document just navigate to their company intranet and click the Office Excel document.

This functionality is particularly powerful when thinking about rolling out Office Excel 2010 to provide PowerPivot functionality. Only a handful of business users actually produce content, with the rest just consuming it. Using Excel Services, the only users who will need to have Office Excel 2010 are the producers of content. The consumers can interact with the PowerPivot documents without ever having to leave their browser or install the latest version of Office Excel."

Now with this information, lets loop back around, and refocus this for use with Dynamics AX. Think again, Role Centers, and the dashboards that executives love to use and make use of. Role Centers are great! And these dashboards will become even more useful, with the ability for content producing users to have access to the needed data, and be able to create usable PowerPivot and Excel parts, that can be published through MOSS, and be made use of for the Role Center Dashboards.

This is the battle that happens a lot with BI tools. They are hard to setup, then complex to maintian and develop. With the latest releases of Office, SharePoint, SQL Server --- Microsoft is deliverying a product / technology in PowerPivot that is addressing this issue. And it can be used with Dynamics AX, and should be considered for upcoming, future implementations and anyone on older AX installs that are seeking and wanting self-service, BI solutions that are familiar and work native with their ERP investment.

To wrap this post up, I want to piont you to the PowerPivot home.: www.PowerPivot.com

That is a great resource to start checking out, and reading now. Also there is a really great blog called.: PowerPivotPro, which is operated by Rob Collie, who is a Microsoft employee of 13 years, and a self proclaimed Excel geek, Business Intelligence professional, all-around data enthusiast, and one of the founding engineers behind PowerPivot, Microsoft’s new self-service BI offering.

His blog has some great post, which I actually subscribe to through my Amazon Kindle. (Thanks Rob for a great blog!)

Also there is the Microsoft Team blog, for PowerPivot.: Microsoft PowerPivot - Team Blog, and with it's recent post, helps bring the Cloud (Azure) into focus with BI and PowerPivot. Check out the latest DataSource adds.:



Notice SQL Azure? That's right, all of these technologies, coming next year in full release, giving the ability to span, scale, dig and report --- all for helping make businesses and customers more Dynamic. And what fits in their best as the ERP platform? Microsoft Dynamics AX!

That's all for now, and I know it's a lot to chew on. Check back soon, as we kick off 2010 next week, and as I have a whole lot more to post about, including a new interview, or two. See you then!




"Visit the Dynamics AX Community Page today!"

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!




"Visit the Dynamics AX Community Page today!"

More Focus on the Cloud

Alright,

So a topic that I have not talked about in a few months is really about to come into focus. Specifically in 2010. What I am talking about is Cloud Computing, and focused on the Cloud Platforms.

That's right I used the plural, because there are many now to choose from. However, the two that I will focus on for my postings are Windows Azure Cloud Platform, and then Google's AppEngine Cloud Platform.



Sometimes it will be a vs. and sometimes it will be different approaches. Because believe me, there are some major differences. For example SQL Azure is a true relational database. I have setup a SQL Azure database, then use SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) to connect to it, and create tables, etc. Then use SSIS to initially fill the tables or work with that data. It's that simple with creating your relational data with SQL Azure.




However with Google's AppEngine it's a different ball game as POJO's, Plain Old Java Objects are stored via JDO, or Java Data Objects, into a not so relational datastore.

So this is a totally different mind set in thinking.

Now, to point why this will be important for 2010, and beyond. First all of the previous news and interest up to this point, but now check out the following three links.:

- RCPMAG: Making a Cloud Play
Check this statement out from that post.:
"What are kids doing in college today? They don't have Windows servers sitting in their dorm rooms to build really cool applications -- but they do have access to the Google App Engine. What's going to happen in three to five years when those kids start coming into the workforce? You're going to come in with a proposal for $100,000 of infrastructure costs, and there's going to be some kid fresh out of college saying, 'I think I can do that for nothing.' You have to understand the tradeoffs. There might be a reason to spend $100,000 -- there might not be."

That is a big, and true statement. Think about what happened when all of us College kids had Microsoft to play with? Or Java even, how did that change the world? This is going to be a similar aspect.

Now the following, point to interest and also Microsoft expanding it's Office Web Applications testing.:

-ZDNet: Survey: cloud interest grows triple-fold; cost may not be main factor
-Microsoft expanding Office Web Apps test program

Both Microsoft Windows Azure Platform and Google.com AppEngine are in beta still but very soon will be in full swing. And I have been playing with both, and you can do a lot already with these two. Again though it's a totally different mindset sometimes when you look at how you design a service, application, etc.

So I am using this post to talk about the focus on the Cloud, and these two options for working with Dynamics AX instances, and having real world, pratical applications living in the cloud, parts living in the cloud, services living in the cloud, and interacting with Dynamic AX instances on different levels.

The Hybrid Cloud will be the most domaint, and will be like that for the next 5-8 years, as trust builds and certain low level aspects of the computing pardiam are worked out.

See you soon, as we will go cloud hopping! Yes cheezy closing tag... oh well!




"Visit the Dynamics AX Community Page today!"