It’s important as you plan out your installation to understand what email sending capabilities you need. This is dependent on the functionality you use in AX.

Why is this important? Well some functions are sent from the client side meaning that the AX Client makes a call to Outlook and Outlook will send the email. Some functions are on the server side meaning the AOS will use the email parameters to send the email from the server side via an SMTP server, for example Microsoft Exchange.

Here is a quick video of the concept:

This is a quick summary of some of the functions email is sent out from in Dynamics AX 2012:

User prints report and sends via email.
This is a client side function if the user doesn’t select sending to batch. Some documents like sales confirmation won’t allow being sent to batch if email is selected as the destination.

Alert Notifications via Email
This is a server side function.

Notifications via Email from Workflow
This is a server side function.

Retail – Send email receipts
This is a server side function

Retail – Send email notification
This is a server side function

Sales and Marketing.
There is a mix of client and server side functions in here for drag and drop and email mail outs to  customers.

There are probably a few places I’m missing describing but at least you have the context for awareness in planning purposes.

I did a post earlier on setting up the server side email parameters which you can find here

https://organicax.com/2014/08/14/setting-up-email-for-workflow-and-alerts-notifications/

As well while you are planning you infrastructure you should be aware of the other office applications like Excel and your options in a remote desktop environment. This post might be worth reviewing as well

https://organicax.com/2014/09/13/export-to-excel-client-server-option/

Cheers

Lachlan