Microsoft Dynamics AX Licensing Optimization Study

How to minimize the number of changes and work iterations while maximizing the savings on Enterprise Licenses

User Licensing in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 is determined by the highest license level of a menu item to which the user has access to. There are four system user license types: Enterprise, Functional, Task, and Self-Serve. Microsoft provides an aggregated approach which means that the access and its costs expands as the license type increases. Enterprise CALs have access to the most significant functionality and the highest cost while Self-Serve CALs have the most limited functionality and the lowest cost.

So why is this important for your business? Microsoft can perform an audit and asses you increased license fees if the configuration of the different types of CALs that your organization purchased is not correct. Now, knowing this, how can licensing cost be quickly reduced without having to redo your security completely? You might be thinking: “identify the security role that bumps the user to the Enterprise CAL and it is done.” Well, this might be easier said than done; when dealing with medium to large or multinational companies you will encounter a significant number of system users. Additionally, the organization might have 100% custom security roles and a significant amount of development customization, therefore analyzing system user by system user seems not to be a viable option.

After doing some analytics on Enterprise vs. Functional CALs for a client, we found that Enterprise CALs accounted for 97%, Functional CALs for 2%, and 1% between Task CALs and Self-Serve CALs. The number of security roles assigned to a user varied from 1 security role to up to 24, with 12 being the average number of security roles, and 3 being the most typical number of security roles assigned to a system user. Additionally, we found that 90% of their custom security roles required an Enterprise CAL. Hence, analyzing system user by system user or changing 90% of their custom security roles were not viable options.

Microsoft provides over 100 standard roles that can be implemented out of the box, of these 46% are Enterprise CAL. Consequently, we extrapolated that the custom security roles Enterprise CAL could be reduced from 90%. This presented the opportunity of defining a systematic method to minimize the number of changes and work iterations while maximizing the savings on licensing, with these clear objectives we created a three step licensing optimization approach:

• Identify the number of menu item changes necessary to convert a security role from Enterprise CAL to Functional CAL.
• Identify the number of users attached to each Security Role.
• Identify the Security Roles with the least number of menu item changes necessary to convert a Security Role from an Enterprise CAL to a Functional CAL that have the most number of users.A pilot study was performed to estimate the impact the optimization approach will have on reducing system users that required an Enterprise CAL, the results of the study yielded a 45% reduction from Enterprise CALs to Functional CALs.

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