Dynamics AX Overview

The latest minor version of Dynamics AX, Dynamics AX 2012 R3, became generally available in May 2014. The version has new capabilities for warehouse and distribution functions, retail point-of-sale mobile solutions, procurement features to manage vendor requests and proposals, and budget planning improvements such as rule-based allocations and what-if scenarios.

The next version of Dynamics AX (AX 7 and code-named Rainier) drops the version number of previous releases and is simply called Dynamics AX. It became available as a Microsoft-hosted service in the first quarter of 2016 and is expected to be available on-premises in late 2016. AX 7 is the first Microsoft-hosted release, residing as a multitenant offering in Azure. Customers planning to deploy AX 7 on-premises will have new requirements, including Windows Server 2016, Azure Stack, SQL Server 2016, and Lifecycle Services. AX 7 can only be deployed through Lifecycle Services, an Azure-hosted environment that controls the deployment, updating, and management of servers in an AX 7 environment.