There are a number of ERP software solutions available in the UK, Microsoft Business Solutions have Dynamics AX 2009, Dynamics NAV 2009, Dynamics CRM, look at IFS, IFS, IFS component base software, Syspro and Epicore have enjoyed popularity and there’s a number of Sage systems available. Sage have several Sage products. Navision, Axapta and Great Plains were forerunners of Dynamics. SSA, Infor, Swan and System21 are solution names that some will recognises as well as Oracle and SAP. Consolidation has occurred in the ERP market and its forecast that only the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and SAP will have the financial stability to stave off take over. Axapta vacancies, Dynamics AX vacancies, Hosted ERP as a service, Axapta Online,

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 and Microsoft Office

 

A cornerstone of Microsoft's approach in Dynamics AX 2009 was the continued development of integrated innovation, put simply AX talks to other applications and in particular other Microsoft applications.

 

Integrated innovation enables you to achieve the ultimate goal of empowering Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009  users which can dramatically improve productivity.

 

  • Navigation pane especially designed to help users feel at ease with the application; this helps decrease the training required for new users and improves early adoption of the application.
  • Data in Microsoft Dynamics AX can be exported to Microsoft Office programs like Word, Excel and Outlook so employees can analyse data in familiar every day use applications.
  • Users don’t have to spend time switching between Microsoft Dynamics AX and Microsoft Office Outlook – calendar info, meetings, contacts and tasks are automatically synchronised.
  • Working together with Microsoft Office Excel 2007 means users get all the benefits of the rich visual enhancements to charts and enhanced data visualisation such as data bars.
  • Microsoft Dynamics AX Enterprise Portal is based on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and can therefore take advantage of the advanced features offered in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
  • Take advantage of the flexibility and the new cube functions in Microsoft Office Excel 2007 to build a custom report from an OLAP database, which is based on cube definitions created in Microsoft Dynamics AX. Users can create Pivot Table views more easily by dragging fields where they want them to be displayed.

 

Fig 1.

 

 

Fig 2. Click to enlarge.

Dynamics AX 2009 can send or synchronise with other solutions such as Microsoft Office or Microsoft Outlook (see Fig.1) but equally these solutions can get the data from Dynamics AX as can be seen in fig 2. 

 

Underlying data tables within AX can be exposed to products like Microsoft Excel, which with its familiar reporting tools can be used to present data as a user requires without necessarily having to rely on specialist IT skills. 

 

The source of this information is Dynamics AX and usually only a mouse click away, there's no reliance on third party products,  data integrity, security and origin all being managed by core AX functionality.

 

Dynamics AX 2009 brought about a sea change in the level of integration between the back office ERP application and front office Microsoft products such as MS Excel, Outlook, MS Word and MS Project. IT within the workplace is coming together like it never has before, led by Microsoft and Dynamics AX 2009.
 
Other important new features in Dynamics AX 2009 include governance and control and work flow functionality. These modules will help control and govern the processes within your organisation especially as the distance between front and back office applications narrows still further, this convergance requires a point of control and that will originate from Dynamics.
 


 

 

 

 

Copyright AXSoftware 2007