What About the Microsoft .NET Framework Parts

The situation is much less “crystal clear” when it comes to leveraging components of the Microsoft .NET Framework. Namely, on the programming and development platform side, only Microsoft Dynamics SL [evaluate this product] is leveraging Visual Basic.NET (VB.NET), one of the languages embraced by .NET. Having already abandoned the gut-wrenching route of a single code base, as noted in Part 1, Microsoft now has to live with the proprietary platforms within Dynamics GP (i.e., Dexterity) , Dynamics NAV (i.e., C/Side AL), and Dynamics AX (i.e., X++/MorphX).

But, on the upside, the abovementioned Windows WF technology, which is an application-hosted workflow orchestration engine, and with a VS.NET design experience, is much more pervasively used throughout Dynamics. WF tools are VS.NET-based tools for developers that add simplified analyst (information worker) experiences.

The technology originated in the Microsoft BizTalk Server team (to be described later on), and in a future major release of BizTalk, WF will become the orchestration engine for BizTalk. WF is used in SharePoint and within Dynamics applications (i.e., Dynamics GP 10, Dynamics AX 2009, and Dynamics CRM 4.0) as the workflow engine. A distinct feature is its Tracking Provider architectural design (Dynamics AX 2009 implements this) that allows users to capture process execution information in the same database as the transaction data.

There is the ability here to track and record data about WF instances as they execute, such as the current status of long running processes, time spent across parts of/the whole process, exception paths taken, etc. This enables an analysis like, for example, how much time or how many escalations is it taking the user to approve Purchase Orders (PO) for his/her preferred suppliers with PO’s value under US$25,000.

Furthermore, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), formerly called Indigo and WinFX, is an application web services inter-communication framework, and can be used to access Dynamics AX 4 and 2009 business logic through web service interfaces. This provides a higher level document interface to the application for integration, complementing the .NET Business Connector which offers more granular, lower level component interfaces to the Dynamics AX business logic. Microsoft’s .NET Business Connector replaces the older Microsoft Component Object Model (COM)-based COM Business Connector.

Sharing SharePoint and Unified Communications

Microsoft SharePoint is the platform for portal-based collaboration and document management/enterprise content management (ECM). The product also works tightly with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Unified Communications (UC), both Microsoft technologies that will be described in detail later on. This integration provides great visibility for workflows related to documents and document libraries, and improving collaboration through the “presence” and “click to communicate” features.

Today, SharePoint is the universal portal technology for the Dynamics portfolio; for example, in Dynamics AX 2009, the AX Enterprise Portal (formerly Axapta Enterprise Portal) is now based on SharePoint. The portal was devised from the standard SharePoint design experience, whereby a gallery of Dynamics AX Web parts is now available, making it very simple to bring to the surface Dynamics AX data (with the inherent AX security model enforced) on SharePoint portal pages.

In addition to Web parts, other strategies for SharePoint integration are its Business Data Catalog (BDC) Web Services feature (currently used within Microsoft Dynamics GP [evaluate this product] and Dynamics CRM [evaluate this product]), and data binding (within Dynamics AX). It is likely that BDC services will grow further in importance, and we should expect a broad Microsoft Dynamics consistency around this feature.

The abovementioned UC technology provides the ability for applications to identify users’ “presence” and enable “click to communicate” capabilities. Via Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, Dynamics AX 2009 and Dynamics CRM 4.0 currently work with UC (which is envisioned for the upcoming Dynamics ERP releases too). For example, whenever a user sees a person in the application screen, he/she can also see a presence indicator showing if they are “out of the office”, “in a meeting”, “on a call”, or “available”. By clicking on the indicator, a user gets to pick the preferred method to communicate with them with a single click, whether it might be via email, instant messenger (IM), or phone, if the company has the computer telephony integration (CTI) capabilities.

The Microsoft Dynamics team is working together with the UC team to develop even more advanced scenarios that bring people closer to the processes represented in their applications. One such possible scenario, “Call Center of the Future”, was showed at Convergence 2008 during Steve Ballmer’s keynote speech. Expected scenarios for the next version of UC platform will revolve around how to factor in application embedding, advanced in-context collaboration scenarios, and blending UC and business process management (BPM).