Overview of Microsoft Dynamics

Rafal Lukawiecki
Strategic Consultant & Director
Project Botticelli Ltd
rafal@[Link]

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Who is This Session For?

IT Professionals not familiar with Microsoft Dynamics who are
looking for a product overview that contains general technical
information
Consultants interested in business management automation
Companies interested in using Microsoft Dynamics

If you are already familiar with Microsoft Dynamics you are welcome
to stay but you are unlikely to learn much new to you

© 2007 Project Botticelli Ltd & Microsoft Corp. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Windows, Windows Vista and other product names are or may be
registered trademarks and/or trademarks in the U.S. and/or other countries. The information herein is for informational purposes only and represents
the current view of Project Botticelli Ltd as of the date of this presentation. Because Project Botticelli & Microsoft must respond to changing market
conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft and Project Botticelli cannot guarantee the
accuracy of any information provided after the date of this presentation. MICROSOFT AND PROJECT BOTTICELLI MAKE NO WARRANTIES,
EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION. E&OE.

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Objectives
Introduce the product family of Microsoft
Dynamics
Explain the goals of business
management automation
Outline the future
Briefly look at the architecture of Microsoft
Dynamics to give you a feel how it might
be part of your organisation

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Session Agenda
Introduction to Microsoft Dynamics and
Business Management Automation
Architectural Overview

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Introduction to
Microsoft Dynamics

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What is Microsoft Dynamics?

“Microsoft Dynamics is a line of integrated, adaptable
business-management solutions that works like and with
other Microsoft software to help you drive success.”
From [Link]/dynamics
It is a suite of systems for typical business management
needs:
Supply Chain Management
Customer Relationship Management
Financial Management

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Supply Chain Management

SCM covers a wide variety of
ERP (Enterprise Resource
Planning) applications,
including automation of:
Inventory management
Order processing, including
self-service portals
Production project
management
Distribution
Vendor management

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Customer Relationship
Management
Sales and marketing
automation, including:
Lead tracking and
profitability assessment
Contact management
Opportunity generation
Campaign management
Service delivery tracking
Problem resolution

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Financial Management
Main applications
include:
Accounting support with
regulatory compliance
International dealings
with multiple currencies
and languages
Business performance
monitoring
Business intelligence
analytics for decision
making

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Microsoft Investment
Microsoft has invested over $1bn in Microsoft
Dynamics, mostly through a number of
acquisitions over the past decade

Great: plenty of features, many abilities and huge

expertise in the product suite available today
Confusing: overlap of functionality, different
development approaches, unclear choices
Let me help you...

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Business Wants Management Automation

The value of accounting packages is well known and

proven
Supply Chain Management, Enterprise Resource
Planning, and Customer Relationship Management are
well established in medium and larger business
Traditionally, this was difficult for smaller organisations
due to cost and lack of flexibility
Smaller organisations rarely formalise their business processes
But: clever modularisation of management systems +
your ability to customise them = value for every
organisation

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Products within Microsoft Dynamics

Microsoft offer consists, today, of Microsoft Dynamics GP
the following main products (there Current version: 9.0, 8
are additional related products, localisations
such as Forecaster etc.): Not available in Slovenian
Formerly known as: Microsoft
Microsoft Dynamics AX Business Solutions-Great Plains
Current version: 4.0, 40
localisations Microsoft Dynamics NAV
Slovenian will be available Current version: 5.0, 34
localisations
Formerly known as: Microsoft
Axapta Slovenian fully supported
Formerly known as: Microsoft
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Navision
Current version: 3.0, 22
localisations Microsoft Dynamics SL
Slovenian fully supported Current version: 6.5, available in
US and Latin America only
Formerly known as: Microsoft
CRM Formerly known as: Microsoft
Business Solutions -Solomon

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Product Application Comparison

A Somewhat Subjective and Generalised Opinion

Product Strength
AX Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) in business of: manufacturing,
service, distribution and wholesale. Modern supply chain support with
RFIDs. Multicurrency. Helps with legal compliance.
CRM Outlook-like support of the sales cycle and opportunity management.
Marketing campaigns. Incident management. Probably the most
.NET-like of all Dynamics.
GP Financial management. Stress on business process integration.
NAV Particularly suited to smaller and medium organisations. Covers
CRM, ERP and financial management. Good support of Europe-
specific legal needs. Customer-faced e-business portals.
SL Combines financials, order management and project management for
smaller and medium organisations. US and Canada specific, not
available in Europe.

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Future of Microsoft Dynamics

November 2006 in Munich, Bill Gates announced
Microsoft Dynamics Live, starting with CRM, in late 2007
Presents a serious hosting and re-sale opportunity, especially in
conjunction with consulting services that are likely to be required
Overall, Microsoft have to integrate all the five products
into a unified offer, but this will take time, perhaps
another 3 years at least
In particular, it will be necessary to unify the developer side of
Dynamics, which is made a little easier by the gradual move of
the suite towards Web Services and .NET
This move is already under way

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Microsoft Dynamics Roadmap

Slide From Convergence 2006 Conference

Role-based Enhanced
user user
experience experience

SharePoint Workflow &

portals and process-centric
workflow design

SQL contextual “Best of”

business application
intelligence (BI) functionality

Easy integration Simple,

& extensibility via model-driven
web services development &
customization

Online processes, Online processes,

collaboration, and collaboration, and
community community
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Architectural Overview
AX, CRM, GP, and NAV – but not SL (as not available outside
US and Canada)

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Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Review: ERP, CRM, and financials for a smaller to medium
business, with a great self-service portal for partners and
customers

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Architecture of NAV (1/2)

Traditional client-server
application, with business
logic on the server, and
to some extent, client
Client has a feel of Outlook
You can integrate with
Office Outlook and Word
(for mail merge)
NAV Application Server :
Installs and runs with SQL
Server 2005 (or 2000)

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Architecture of NAV (2/2)

Integration within External integration:
NAV with BizTalk Server
NAV Commerce Portal ERP with other
Microsoft Commerce systems, such as SAP
Server customised by R/3
NAV
Customer-self service
NAV Commerce
Gateway
Microsoft BizTalk
Server customised by
NAV
Partner integration

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Customising NAV
Two choices today:
Use C/SIDE (Client/Server Integrated
Development Environment)
C/AL is an event-driven programming language for above, a 4GL
combining data access and usual imperative programming
semantics
They are easy – creating bespoke NAV applications for small and
medium clients has to be efficient to be profitable!

Develop .NET components

As of NAV 5.0 (shipped March 2007) we have support of native .NET
development
In a 3-tier model

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NAV and Microsoft Servers

NAV 5.0 fully supports SQL Server 2005
features
New abilities include Business Intelligence and
Data Mining, based on SQL Server 2005
With NAV 4.0 use SP3 for same purpose
SharePoint server integrates well (NAV
WebParts) for creating custom portals

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Microsoft Dynamics AX
Reminder: AX is an application for mainly SCM-ERP, with
financial abilities – for larger organisations

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Dynamics AX
Architecture
An object-oriented 3-tier application
Client is a .NET 1.1 application
Integrates with Office for analysis services (not required)
Server, called AOS (Application Object Server) uses .NET 2.0
Requires SQL Server 2000 or 2005 or an Oracle database
Requires Active Directory

Everything could be installed on just 1 workstation

Logically, AX can model a hub-and-spoke departmental
structure of an organisation

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Customising AX
Application Object Layers
AOL is an approach to application modelling
through predefined layers, each with a different
scope of ownership and responsibility
E.g. Some of the layers are predefined by Microsoft,
another can be modified by the system
integrator/solution provider, yet another by the client’s
own in-house developers
Interesting logic for in-depth customisation
You would modify one of the layers at organisational
level, another at departmental and so on

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Deep Tailoring of AX
MorphX, IntelliMorph, and X++
If you want your developers to tailor Dynamics
AX in-depth, they have two choices:
MorphX is the Microsoft Dynamics AX Integrated
Development Environment – the way you develop
natively for AX
To do that, you program in X++, which is a C++-like language which
integrates a number of database-like (SQL SELECT-like) statements

However, you can create components using .NET

Framework, due to CLR integration in the current
version
This is made easier by the IntelliMorph component which you use with Visual
Studio – it adds support for data types and debugging

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Dynamics AX and OLAP Reporting

Microsoft Dynamics AX can make good use of SQL
Server 2005 Analysis Services to generate OLAP cubes
and reports
You can also use SQL Server 2000 SP4
The interface is in the AX client, allows you to directly
configure and build cubes
Indirectly, this leads to interesting development
opportunities for applications based on business
intelligence originating from your ERP system
Consider the power of Data Mining of SQL 2005 in conjunction
with Dynamics AX as a base for application development –
without or with OLAP cubes

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Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Reminder: As name suggests, it handles Customer
Relationship Management for sales and marketing
automation, lead and opportunity processing, and contact
management

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Architecture of Microsoft Dynamics CRM

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Architecture of CRM
Architecture of CRM is based on a composite client and a 3-tier-
server:
Client runs within Microsoft Outlook and connects to the server directly...
...or asynchronously through messages, utilising Microsoft Exchange as
a Router
CRM introduces its own model for this form of service-orientation
Or, you can use a web client...
Both client and server can be deeply customised
Dependencies:
Office Outlook and MSDE for clients (optional)
Exchange Server 2003
SQL Server 2000 or 2005
Dynamics CRM will run on Small Business Server 2003, too

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Customisation
Represent your organisation’s customer processes as:
.NET (1.1+) components (using CRM 3.0 SDK)
.NET Workflow Assemblies
BizTalk pipelines (using BizTalk Adapter for CRM)
You represent client’s processes as objects in CRM
Integration with your systems can be accomplished
through use of Web Services
All CRM logic can be accessed using web services

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Microsoft Dynamics GP
Reminder: Accounting and financial management system for
medium and larger organisations

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GP Architecture
A more traditional thick client-db server
application
Client runs majority of tasks
Task processing can be allocated to another, peer, workstation, or
It is possible to designate a “server” workstation for processing
computationally intensive tasks

Server is a SQL Server 2000 or 2005, which contains

a number of stored procedures representing server-
side logic of GP
Further, GP application is optimising for Terminal
Server deployment

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Interesting Features of GP
Can use digital
signatures on financial
transactions to enable
stricter compliance
Interoperates with
Microsoft CRM
Allows integration of
financials within the sales
process

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Customising GP
Two choices:
In-depth tailoring requires use of Dexterity environment
Form Designer and Report Writer within a development environment
that also has a debugger, source code control etc.
sanScript language – English-like programming language
Function library to use with sanScript
COM support
UI customisation:
VBA for Microsoft Dynamics GP, or
Modifier (simpler customisation)
Of all Dynamics, GP, arguably, requires the least in-
depth customisation

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Analytics in GP

In addition to built-in
analytics, OLAP cubes
can be built over the
underlying GP SQL
database
Good support in the
product for this task

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eConnect
Enterprise Application Integration with GP
eConnect, originally created on top of .NET Framework
1.0 and SQL Server 2000, allows you to build
applications for data and transaction integration
It is a set of stored procedures in SQL allowing
import/export of transactional data
BI and Data Mining opportunity
You interact with it using any of the following:
eConnect .NET Assembly (typically!) or COM Object
BizTalk Adapter
or – directly, if you are SQL developer

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Conclusions

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So, where are we now?

In transition
Microsoft is interconnecting and unifying the product suite
All of the Microsoft Dynamics products provide good
business value today – as proven by Microsoft partners
If you need Business Management Automation – try it for free
As consultants or partners, now is a good time to get
involved, to benefit from the crest of Wave 1 and to get
ready before Wave 2 of the products hits
Find out more at:
[Link]/dynamics
[Link]/dynamics/community - many external resources
(click at the bottom-right)
Your localised Customersource & Partnersource sites

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Summary
Microsoft Dynamics family provides solutions for
business management automation
As an enterprise, you can benefit from it now
As this field grows, the scope for opportunities
seems boundless
If you want to develop this area as your service
business become a Certified Partner in Microsoft
Dynamics to get support

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