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.