The first two days of Microsoft Convergence 2015 EMEA has passed in Barcelona and the many sessions with a technological angle has revealed a lot of interesting topics. I would like to give a quick summary highlight on what can we expect around the Microsoft Dynamics AX space and its technology stack.
- Responsive layout AX 7 user interface served via a web service, without the requirement of a client installation
- Keyboard shortcuts are still available, with slight changes to exclude common overlapping key combinations within web browers
- PowerApps is a new platform which can communicate with a range of applications to quickly and interactively deliver mobile-based apps, including AX
https://powerapps.microsoft.com - Power BI is supported natively within the AX 7 dashboards as tiles
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/axsa/archive/2015/02/18/power-bi-and-dynamics-ax-part-1-introduction.aspx - Application Integration Framework, Data Import Export framework and Office product integrations have all been consolidated to use a Data entity approach using OData as communication protocol
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/hh237663.aspx - Excel static data export is now available on all AX7 forms with a datasource, and interactive two-fold communication has been extended
- SharePoint document store is now seamlessly integrated with AX 7 to replace/extend the Document attachments functionality
- Developer workspace is now an integral part of Microsoft Visual Studio, with keeping the object-based, typed MorphX style development along with the X++ language. There are slight alterations, ie. Jobs are now called differently and are executing server-side due to a lack of a true client
There is no official release date announced yet, Dan Brown (AX R&D General Manager) only has confirmed Q1 2016 for the publicly available version.
As the day progresses at Convergence 2015 EMEA, potentially more news and insight will be revealed.