Top 5 Microsoft Dynamics AX Blogs – Tips & Tricks

5. High Level Overview of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Licensing and Security Architecture

The most straight forward way to customize which actions a specific user may perform in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 is by assigning multiple Security Roles to a user. Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 provides over 100 standard Security Roles. Each role represents the scope of work or collection of responsibilities for every position in the organization. Microsoft Dynamics AX provides 1261 standard Duties. Duties are responsibilities to perform tasks for specific business process. Duties contain privileges, which are collections of menu items. These menu items are mapped to four user license types: Enterprise, Functional, Task, and Self-Serve. Licensing in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 is determined by the highest level of menu item to which a user has access to. For example, from the diagram below the Security Role ‘Accountant’ has two menu items; EPPurchReqAddItem and AssetLocation. The ability or permission to maintain a Fixed Asset Location (AssetLocation) requires an Enterprise access level thus any user assigned to the Accountant Role requires an Enterprise license.

4. Insert Placeholders in Workflows Using X++ (AX 2012)

This post will guide you on how to Insert Placeholders in Workflows Using X++ (AX 2012).

This ability is provided for all the workflows — These Custom placeholders can also be used as conditional statements.

Custom placeholders can be created by simply creating a new method in Document class. The only criteria is ‘Method should follow naming conventions of parmMethod’s’.

Click here to see the example

3. Analyzing Dynamics AX Sales Data with Power BI in 10 minutes

Power BI is a lightweight and simple BI application that can be used to analyze data from many kinds of databases — it has been issued in two editions – professional and free. The main features of it are the number of supported data sources and the ease of the data mashup process. Calculated columns and calculated measures can be used to create different KPI’s and a lot of visualization options provide the ability to see the result on graphs, charts and maps. Below I’ll show how to use it the simplest way, connecting to AX database directly, and how to spend only 10 minutes to create a sales dashboard.

If you need a more mature solution with prebuilt data warehouse, robust ETL processes with change tracking and incremental update, prebuilt reports and so on – please contact Arbela and we can provide you with a ready to use solution.

To create a Power BI dashboard we’ll need the direct access to a AX 2012 SQL Database from your workplace and Power BI Desktop application.

Currently there are two ways to use Power BI – from the web, using Power BI service and from desktop using Power BI desktop application. This is also an option to create a dashboard with Power BI desktop and to upload it then to a Power BI service.

1. Go to www.powerbi.com to download the latest version of Power BI desktop for free. Scroll down the page to find the download link at the very bottom of the page. No registration is needed – just download and install the application.

Click here to continue with the steps

2.How to Convert a Record Into a Template in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012

An extremely high portion of the lifecycle cost of a data entry system is labor. Dynamics AX allows you to speed up the creation of records while increasing data entry accuracy with very minimal effort. Company Account Templates that are available to all users using the selected legal entity. When designing your processes in Dynamics AX, Company Account Templates can be used to ensure that the correct fields are populated with the correct information.

1. Right-click the record that you want to use as a template and select Record info.
2. On the Record information form, click Company accounts template.
3. Type a name and a description for the template, and then click OK.

Click here to continue with the steps

1. Three Common Security Mistakes in AX 2012

As companies upgrading from AX 2009 to AX 2012, there is a clear learning curve when moving from AX 2009 to the AX 2012 security model. In this post, we’ll list some common mistakes in managing security, and how you can avoid them with best practices in AX 2012.

Attempting to Utilize User Groups to Control User Access

While knowledge that AX 2012 uses roles for assigning permissions to users is ubiquitous, less obvious is the purpose of the User Groups in AX 2012. User Group security settings have all but been replaced with Security Roles, and do not provide access to various modules. In AX 2012, User Groups have been stripped down, and now should only be used for the following purposes:

• Assign budget control groups. Users attached to a user group set up as an over-budget user group have permissions to process budget register entries (a) only if available budget balance is sufficient, (b) regardless of available budget balance to cover entry, or (c) only if financial dimension or account is less than the threshold to cover entry. This can be set up for project budgets as well, and it generates a warning message or an error infolog when the project transaction entry is attempted.
• Assign workflow steps to specific user groups. An example of this would be to assign a User Group titled “PO Approval >5k” to a step in a purchase order workflow if the users in the group are allowed to approve purchase orders for values greater than $5,000. Any user in the user group could approve that step in the PO approval process.
• Restrict financial posting. You can set specific user groups to allow posting to a ledger period that is not open. Additionally, you can set up posting restrictions on the Journal Name, which would designate which users attached to selected user groups can post only journals they create for a specific journal name.

Click here to read more

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