CU8 for R3 was released last week and this has the nice new update feature from the Lifecycle Services so at least you can get up and running pretty quickly to evaluate CU8, test it out and assess the impact to your environment.

I had another R1 installation that I was investigating and issue and reminded me that updating AX still takes some specialist skills to get a hotfix into and environment, manage the test process and move into production. If you are new to AX or new to managing the deployment of hotfixes this TechNet article is probably a good place to start to understand some of the terms and process of updating AX. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh335183.aspx

As a reminder there is also the Issue search tool in Lifecycle Service.

Cheers

Lachlan