Upgrading to D365 from AX 2012 R3 can be easy!
As you may have seen from our Appsource offering , an upgrade from Dynamics AX 2012 to Dynamics 365 can be pretty straightforward. Throughout the years, there have been marketing announcements and presentations about how streamlined an upgrade can be. I remember a couple of years ago, Microsoft rolled some IT director out on the stage at Convergence and said he was able to upgrade his AX 2009 environment to AX 2012 all by himself. That, of course, was met with a chorus of chuckles. Imagine my surprise, though, when we found how easy an upgrade really can be if you’ve tried to stay standard. In our most recent upgrade, we helped someone we initially put on AX2012 upgrade to Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. During the AX 2012 implementation, the customer tried to use standard as much as possible. In fact, the only real customizations were 6 customer-facing reports. Where needed, the customer was willing to slightly modify their business practices to adhere to standard AX with the intention of making upgrades easier in the future. And that they did!
Upgrade Findings
The upgrade was easy. Besides dealing with some growing pains on the upgrade toolset, the biggest efforts were refactoring the reports to match best practices in the cloud and setting up a data warehouse for some external reporting. Here’s a couple of interesting numbers:
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- Number of people in the conference room during the actual upgrade – 2.5
- Number of people in the conference room actually doing anything related to the upgrade – 1
- Start to finish from the customer kicking everyone out of AX2012 R3 to having the database upgraded and in a Tier 2 environment ready for Microsoft DSEs to move to production – 8 hours
- (As an aside, 4 hours of that was creating the bacpac, moving the bacpac, and restoring the bacpac)
- Building the code package on the Tier 2 environment takes 20 minutes
- The resulting code package is about 6MB
Those numbers are insane. This is the power of staying standard as much as possible. We, as partners, need to keep pushing this message and use information like this to help steer our customers in the right direction!
