Community Article: Project Success: From the As Is, To Be and on to deployment

I hope everyone is having a great Friday! I know it's been a crazy week, and frankly I can't believe that it's already over. I wanted to write this Friday on my monthly column for the Microsoft Dynamics Community Site. The focus for this month for that column, is around Project Success.

You can find a direct link to the article here.: Project Success: From the As Is, To Be and on to deployment

From the article:
"What we must understand, from a higher level, still needs to be clear at this point. This is being able to map correctly, with the customer their 'As-Is' story, to help set where they are and how they achieve their current process. Moving from that Analysis / Discovery set of processes, the next step from a business process modeling point of view, is creating the 'To-Be' story. This 'To-Be' story should align with higher level value points, that the customer lays out, from the single question, of: 'What exactly are you trying to do?'"

I believe, as I stated in my article, this is a worthy topic, and one that I plan on bringing a host of Dynamics Community professionals, for helping shape and talk to the points around project success.

I hope your enjoy the read, and as always please send along your thoughts, information, feedback and even stories that you feel might could help in the telling of such a story as Project Success. If you do, and wish it, you will receive credit of course, and so make sure to include your information, LinkedIn, etc.

That's all for this week, may you all have a great and blessed weekend! Till Next Time!

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AX 2012 - Diving into BI Analytics

A major focus for my self, and my work is around driving value for customers, with their AX investments. It's so easy to get caught up in the implementation, and getting the transaction side of a project up and running, that too many times the full solution, and total value that AX as a whole can bring is not fully realized.

To often, the value of out-of-the-box offerings around Business Intelligence (BI), is apart of that overlooked area of AX. This is sometimes, a major part of why, during the sales cycle a company made the choice of going with AX over some other brand of ERP software. At least to a large degree, it is usually a major deciding factor. Why shouldn't it be, with all the wonderful BI concepts built into AX as a product, not just in the formed of typical reports either, but even with contextual BI elements and beyond.



With this in mind, I wanted continue my focus that I started last year, around the BI capabilities for AX 2012, and what it can bring, helping you complete your total solution, and driving further value from what you have already invested in. The next focus, in this BI journey for AX 2012, at least for me and this blog, is around AX 2012 Analytics.



We see the above image, comes from the following section on Microsoft TechNet, talking through the architecture that makes up Analytics side of AX 2012, out-of-the-box offering. Its important to understand the full picture, including how this architecture actually works. As you can see, like the other technologies, used in the Microsoft stack for AX, SQL Server Analysis Services is a key technology to enabling OLAP cubes in AX.

Taking this architecture forward, I think it's important to also see the great resources that Microsoft has given us in this release for AX 2012, around this topic, specifically for the developer in mind, and the development task that are needed to enable, customize and complete a customers BI story, from the Analytics point of view.

These resources I'm speaking to, start with Development Tasks for Analytics [AX 2012]. Going to that resource, you can see several walkthrough's from Creating Cubes within the AOT, to Creating and Displaying new KPI's.

Having this resource, as our starting point, I plan to take this focus on BI further, with using the Contoso database, and showing this offering that is a part of AX 2012, and how it can be used, by you or your customers, the right way - with the goal of driving value.

That's all for today, I hope that you have a great start to the week, and check back soon as a whole lot more to come! Till Next Time!

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AX 2012 and the value of Microsoft's Visual Studio LightSwitch

Recently, I posted an article on my column, for the Microsoft Dynamics Community site, in which I focused in on the Any Device ERP concept. The push towards this concept, enabling true mobile ERP, as I stated in the article, will actually help drive adoption of the Microsoft Windows 8 powered devices.



Also, including in this post, I highlighted and pointed to the use of Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch. I'm really stoked about this product, and the more and more I look at it, the more value I see it can bring to companies. The value, in which I'm referring to here is all about giving companies the ability to simply, and in a fast nature, create Line-Of-Business Applications quickly and easily. This means faster Time-to-Value for such solutions, that are needed by companies, which can extend from Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012.



We see, with AX 2012, a push for it being the central hub of business logic, operations, data and delivery of business intelligence. With this, we also see the move for exposing data, API's and business logic internal and external of AX 2012, via Services. Because of this, companies can use LightSwitch, and it's ability to quickly and easily create apps that extend AX for a company, and help create a more total solution.

This is done, via AX services, be that Document Services, or Custom Services and Service Operations. Taking this design approach then, of exposing Data and Business logic from AX via services, these services then themselves can be consumed within a LightSwitch Application. A great resource for walking through this, by example can be seen at the following location: MSDN: LightSwitch - Consuming Web Services

From the post: "The aim of this document is to show developers how you can easily configure LightSwitch to consume Web Services. This walk-through assumes you have a background knowledge of creating basic applications with LightSwitch."



Having this example, we can now extend AX 2012, with LightSwitch for internally hosted Line-Of-Business (LOB) applications, on IIS, and even quickly scale and create applications that are deployed to Microsoft's Cloud Offering, Azure. In order to enable the scaling to the cloud, we do need to deploy the AX 2012 Services, via IIS, so that they can be consumed externally by the outside world. Doing this, means then, that quickly and easily we can create a Hybrid cloud story, for AX customers, and quickly bring the value to a customer that the cloud brings with scale, agility, and exposing AX business logic and data for consumption through such LightSwitch created apps.

For those customers, that have invested in AX, working with LightSwitch from Visual Studio 2010, will seem familiar, in how it's ability to work with Entity Data Framework, ease of creating and working with services, as well as the Tree Style design of forms, and buttons, that feels similar to AX and how it's forms and UI elements are designed.



So, if your a Microsoft Dynamics AX Customer, I highly recommend looking into either having your Partner, or your staff work with Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch, and how it can be used to extend your AX investment, quickly, efficiently and fast. That's always the goal, and keep in mind Simple is King of value, and let me tell you LightSwitch is one heck of a product that truly simplifies the creation of Line-Of-Business (LOB) applications. It's all about Time-to-Value, and that is why LightSwitch is a tool that should be considered, for completing your companies / customers total solution.

These applications, can then be made a part of the AX story, either hosted externally in the cloud, or internally. After creating and deploying a LightSwitch App, it can be incorporated directly into the user experience, via links hosted within Role Center Pages, to the LightSwitch App UI, or hosted within the AX 2012 Rich Client Forms and UI.



Bringing this full circle and to have a little forward looking exercise here, I personally believe LightSwitch, which currently delivers it's UI via SilverLight, will quickly be updated, once Windows 8 comes out. I believe, that Microsoft will enable you the ability to choose your target UI, be that SilverLight, or XAML+HTML5+JavaScript. The idea, is that LightSwitch will still create the UI for you, and enable fast and easy creation of Apps, that target even the Metro Style UI of Windows 8, and therefore having company specific Win8 Metro Style Apps, that work directly with & extend a companies AX 2012 ERP investment.



The following links, are useful resources that are used throughout this blog post. I would strongly encourage spending time researching and learning from these resources, and others to see how Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch can help you drive the most value out of your AX 2012 investment.:

• Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch Home Page
• Guidelines for Creating WCF RIA Services for LightSwitch
• Walkthrough of a Real-World LightSwitch App used at Microsoft
• LightSwitch Metro Theme Extension Sample

Well that's all for now, I hope everyone has a great productive week. Check back soon as I have a lot of good post coming out, all around AX, the Ecosystem, Spotlights, Interviews and more! Till Next time!


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Microsoft Dynamics AX Benefits Estimator - Overview

Well I hope everyone is doing well today, and your active, productive and driving the Dynamics world we all live and work in. One of the trending Dynamics topics on twitter from yesterday, was around a new online tool Microsoft has released, the Microsoft Dynamics AX Benefits Estimator.



When working with the Benefits Estimator, there are 6 choices, with a key focus around the out-of-the-box industry sector focuses Microsoft offers for AX 2012. We see this, in the second screen, shown below here.



In selecting an industry sector focus, say Manufacturing, we are able to expand different bars, that cover topics like Increased Productivity, and Reduced Administrative Overhead for example. In expanding a bar, say the Increased Productivity bar, we are able to set slider values, that lead us to a dollar value for estimated annual savings for using Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012.



This is all based on information that was gathered via Nucleus Research, per the quote about the tool itself:
"This tool is absed on direct analyst interviews and research on Microsoft Dynamics published by Nucleus Research."



All in all, I think this is a very creative way, for taking staticly collected research data, and giving anyone, possible customers, partners, research analyst, a great way to ineract with that data in a very Dynamic way, that is targeted around specific industry sectors, and based on variables that apply directly to the possible customer that is needing a top notch ERP platform. I think Microsoft has a great marketing hit with this tool, and one that offers some real world information that can help customers see the value AX 2012 can bring to them.

Well that's all for this post, but check back soon as a whole lot more to come, including a new spotlight series on the Dynamics Ecosystem with Kimberly Jones, from Dynamics Hires! Till next time!


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"Visit the Dynamics AX Community Page today!"