Blog: Stories - Microsoft Dynamics 365 & .NET

Integration of the map service with Dynamics AX

For any company engaged in the delivery of goods, of course, the key issue is the calculation of the optimal way of moving goods from warehouses to the consumer. IT-Commune is ready to share the story of integrating the cartographic service with Dynamics AX.

The customer is a small delivery service from Germany. The task of the project was to reduce the cost of delivering goods, specialists had to develop a service that would calculate the path from the closest to the consumer warehouse to the delivery address. An additional requirement was to minimize the costs of this service.

IT-Commune specialists considered customer’s requirements and made a thorough analysis of the map services that were used to calculate the route, among which the Bing Maps service developed by Microsoft was chosen for integration. To solve the problem, the developers created a special key on the Bing Maps service (api), this key was saved in the ERP system, then rest api requests were made using zip codes of the warehouse address and delivery address from the Bing Maps service to calculate the shortest route. The mechanism of operation was that the program calculated the distance from the delivery point to all available warehouses and selected the shortest one.

Thus, the company needed a basic mechanism for organizing logistics, requiring minimal costs in use. IT-Commune specialists offered integration with the Bing Maps service, it allows to make up to 10,000 requests per month for free, which fully met the company’s requirements. The task was solved within a week. In future, the solution suggested by the IT-Commune specialists can also be optimized using WMS at the customer’s request.

How to organize the development and testing environment in Dynamics 365 FO on-premise project properly?

Nowadays many companies are thinking of migrating from previous versions of Dynamics AX to Dynamics 365 F&O, while a large number of companies in Russia are considering the on-premise implementation of this deployment, excluding the cloud option for various reasons.

We would like to share our experience in organizing development and testing environment for on-premise deployment in one of the current projects.

In standard Microsoft practice, the environment with on-premise deployment looks like this:

Developer, UAT (User Accepting Testing) and Production environments are deployed on the client’s local servers, while the test environment is deployed in the Azure cloud. This “long” scheme looks extremely suboptimal to use if a customer wants to save time, because the testing speed of it is low and rolling changes might take hours. In addition, the Customer has to pay for an Azure subscription.

The “long” scheme means that in order to deploy the update package, it will be necessary to re-deploy the entire server cluster on which this solution will be deployed, which takes much more time than the standard scheme for updating source files to one-box servers.

IT-Commune specialists suggested the implementation of a testing environment in the one-box format, in which the testing environment was also deployed on the client’s servers. This change made it possible to reduce the down-time of the test machine from 2 hours to 30 minutes, also if there is no need to synchronize the database during testing, the speed of testing changes was reduced to 8 minutes.

The main difficulty in this case is the need to duplicate all the functions that were previously standardly implemented in Azure “on the ground” in the absence of appropriate documentation. IT-Commune specialists have already made this path and are ready to help anyone who faces this problem in the deployment of development and testing environments.