AX 2012 - EP Development - Warranty Page

Well I hope everyone is enjoying this fine spring day. I love spring time, specifically the closer we get to the start of summer. Every year - my family and I always kick off summer on Memorial Day, and share time together with friends and family. Laughing, and just enjoying being together and out in the sun. With that spirit in mind, lets kick off this Enterprise Portal development focus for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012.

Our first focus, should be around the functional design of what we are trying to achieve. This would typically mean, if this was being developed for a customer project, some functional artifacts were created. This would include discovery efforts, functional requirements documents (FRD), functional design documents (FDD) and so forth. Since this focus of this series is around design and development, I think it's important to acknowledge how best to arrive at a solution.



All of these artifacts that I have mentioned thus far, comes from SureStep, Microsoft methodology for implementing Microsoft Dynamics - including AX 2012. Now with that stated, it is also typical that Sure Step be understood as a toolbox in which project implementer's and customer's, as well as Microsoft can have a common vocabulary and tool set in which to create project artifacts, communicate design, document the project scope, through support and operating with the help of standard operating procedures.

Not to spend to much more time on this point of design, as I could write entirely to much about the process of well executed projects. The point, in short, and so we can get into the meat of this focus - good design is critical. It should focus on the business, it should bring value - and that is the only reason it should be a deliverable.

With this good design in mind, lets assume that we have done our due design, and planning from a functional nature, and we need a custom, Enterprise Portal based Warranty Management Solution. This solution, should allow for the following to take place.:

• Enable Creation of Warranty Master & Reference data
• Enable Warranty Association to Inventory
• Allow for creation of a form that will show up-coming warranty dates for customers, with actions to engage customer to renew
• Track warranty claims from customers
• Allow warranty claim submission by customer

Now there could be a lot more that is done with this, however I believe from the above we can gain a lot of understanding about enterprise portal development, with some functional point to it as well. With that, we will then cover topics of creating pages, creating custom EP forms, using Cue for Role Center pages as well as touch on even workflow for warranty management, and how that works with EP.

To get us started in this effort, we will need a new home on EP for all warranty related scope, that is described above. With that, we will then target creating a custom page on EP for our warranty scope to live on. We can reference the following Microsoft resource page, that gives us a step-by-step on creating a custom EP page for AX 2012.: [MSDN] How to: Create Pages



So the above is the end result, that we are targeting, in having created a custom warranty page, on our EP portal site. Now how did we get there? Well first you have to go to your Enterprise Portal site. From there you need rights to manage the site, and therefore go to site settings, and then more options as we see below.



Once we have selected more options, we need to select pages, and then make sure and highlight Web Part page, and continue on with the process.



After that we need to select pages, and then select the type of page we care about. We are going to stick with: "Header, Footer, 3 Columns" for the basis page of this solution. Further after selecting the type of page, you need to make sure and name this correctly, as we have named below "idbWarrantyManagement.aspx" and notice we are placing this in the Enterprise Portal Document library.



Now that we have created our custom page, the next step is adding it to the EP navigation. We will pick back up on this, and continue forward with our focus on EP development, for our Warranty Management Solution in the next part of this series of post. The next steps we will add this to our EP navigation, and move forward with creating the scope needed that will allow us to have a Warranty Management Solution that gives us the scope we laid out in the start of this post.

That's all for today, but check back soon as more to come, including a continued dive into BI, spotlight post, book review, and of course our continued dive into EP design and development for AX 2012!Till Next Time!
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