Microsoft Dynamics AX Tech Conf 2011 Part I

I was thrilled to attend the DAX tech conf 2011 last week. It was a great 4-day event, because not only I had the chance to have a very refresh look of the new AX release – AX 2012, but also I was surprised and encouraged by the number of attendees – over 1200, doubling MS expectations. It’s great to see such tremendous interests in the market. Without any doubt, I think AX 2012 is a big improvement over the previous versions. Here is a summary of the sessions I went.

Financial Data Architecture

• Shared COA, currencies, calendars and dimensions
• Unlimited # of dimensions
• Dimension can be created based on user’s custom list, e.g. site, campaign, etc.
  Global Address Book
• To reduce data redundancy, addresses are ONLY stored in the address table and not populated in other related tables, e.g. salestable, purchtable.
• Unlimited # of addresses: 1 type of address can have multiple addresses.
• Addresses can be selected on the go.
• Security on GAB controlled by “policies”: creat a team and assign the team to GAB to restrict access on related records.

Patterns in Building Forms for Usability (2 sessions)

• Form layout has changed. It has nav pane, action pane (replacing buttons on the RHS), filter view, grid view, description pane, and fact box.
• When design a form, can select from Styple, e.g. list page, detail form, etc.
• Grid view is grouped by fast tabs instead of tabs
• Form has Edit and View modes, to prevent user accidentally deleting/editing records
• Same form can be published for EP use. Simple like that! This is controlled by a new form property “Display Target”, i.e. auto, form, EP
• Parts (like widget). Can be reused on any form. E.g. fact box, description pane.
• Fact boxes display a collection of related records to the current record, e.g. customer, sales orders for this customer.
• AX wizard tool for validating form style. Inconsistencies can be fixed by either auto fix or user manual change.
• Menu item has a region/country property. In each company, it only shows menu items matching the country code.

Role-based Security (2 sessions)

• Roles (80): a collection of business duties, more like business title e.g. AP clerk, sales manager, etc.
• Duties (767): job functions and can be categories by process cycles, e.g. cutting cheques, sales order entry, etc.
• Priviledges (5777): a group of entry points for specific tasks i.e. menu accesses, e.g. create AP payment journal, create sales order, etc.
• Permissions (20k+): security on objects, e.g. CREATE ledgerjournaltable, CREATE ledgerjournaltrans, etc.
• Out-of-box roles can be categorized by functional (AP clerk), org title (CFO), app role (system user)
• Can dynamically assign roles to users based on user defined query, e.g. based on job title
• Role hierarchy is supported, e.g. acct mgr could include acct clerk role.
• Duties can be categorized as Enable, Maintain, Inquire, Record, Verify, etc.
• Duties should may need to customize to represent business domains, and should stay relatively stable over release.
• New security access to standard AX objects should rarely go below the Duties level, meaning adding/editing roles and duties should be good enough to meet business security requirements.
• Dont need to maintain security for different domains. Can select which company user should get the role when do role assignment. Can assign to companies across domains!!
• Can assign user either roles or duties or priviledges
• Duty segregation: to avoid security conflict, can set up segregation rules so whenever a conflict occurs AX will alert for proper resolution.
• XDS (extended Data Security) framework: allows to define “policies” to restrict views on linked tables. e.g. Primary table (custtable) – constrained tables (custtrans, saels table, projtable), and a policy defines a query that the user shouldn’t see any records from certain customers.
• Out of box AX 2012 has 11 predefined policies
• Ax users don’t have to in the AD. Easier to manager external users.
• Security key is no longer needed

Product Master Data

• Add in a new concept “Product” on the top. It is shared across all companies.
• “Items” are replaced by “Released Products”. Items can’t be used till products are released
• Item can be directly created without first going through product master, and a product master will be created correspondingly.
• “Inventory dimension” is replaced by “proudct dimension”, “storage dimension” and “tracking dimension”.
• Items can be shared across different companies when they’re released
• Product dimensions, storage dimensions and prod attributes are shared
• Product type: Item, Service
• BOM is not shared
• Product can have different “product variants” based on combination of dims. Each prod variant can be released as an item.
• Item model group has added a checkbox for stock or non stock items. Item item with non-stock (e.g. expense items)- inventtrans but no inventsum.

To be continued.