Preliminary Installation and Toying

Today and Yesterday were filled with playing around with my new software toy....Dynamics AX 4.0. We received our initial CDs and License keys. I installed the Demonstration on my laptop inside of a Virtual PC and I installed a preliminary development server on our new PE 2850. I have the Development Environment implementation broken up into three distinct servers: A VM SQL Server, A VM AOS/File Server, and an IIS Server. I installed the client on the Domain Controller hosting the three VMs and I was shocked how easy it's installation was. According to what I've read it's apparently exponentially easier to install than it's predecessor, Axapta 3.0.

Surprisingly, there's quite a bit of documentation in the What's New guides and Implementations Guide. Judging by how antiquated and pieced together the Axapta 3.0 docs were, this was not expected. Tomorrow will be spent rummaging through the docs and get a basic AX install configured. Our Partner will be on site the week after July 4th and will step me through their recommended installation process and setting up a base installation. At least by that time comes I will have at minimum installed it twice, maybe three times, and will have an idea about questions to ask when he/she guides me through the correct way.

From what I see so far this is an enormous package. I'm sure it's nothing quite like SAP, but still nonetheless it's huge. One piece alone, the AIF, is almost a complete mammoth application just in itself. I'm going to be concentrating on getting some sample documents templates out so that I can test some scenarios of EDI parsed and translated through our Message Brokering software to be outputted and inserted into AX.

I will continue to update my progress on this site and look forward to comments regarding my experiences. I'm looking forward to this journey as it will be a long one lasting roughly 16 to 24 months before we are fully live on AX.

Hope you enjoy the ride,

David