A question around Organization Modeling for AX 2012

I hope that you have had a productive week thus far, filled with all things Microsoft Dynamics! As promised earlier this week, I wanted to post today about a specific question that came from my post on AX 2012 - Understanding & Extending the Organization Model.



The question posed by a reader of that post, is around the modeling of their organization for business units, and associating released products to specific Business Units.

Lets take this possed question a little further, and assume that the business unit association is desired to limit the use of released products.



Since released products, with AX 2012 out-of-the-box, are legal entity specific entities, that is the level of separation that comes as offered. Further out-of-the-box, with configuration, you can have business units used as financial dimensions. Meaning that we could then associate a released product, within a legal entity, to a business unit.



Having this association however, would not by itself limit the use of products, for users of AX, that work within specific business units. We have added something new here right? We can associate business units with released products, as financial dimensions. However the new element that we need to try and achieve is limiting the released products in a legal entity by business unit.

Now let us think about this. We could easily jump right into code driven design, that would allow for releasing products to business units, within legal entities. But why do that? The idea with Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 is to model more and code less.

Our secret to success in this endeavor then, would be to think in terms of modeling. This includes having Organizational modeling that has an operating model, that gives us legal entities, with business units under them. Further having the financial dimensions modeled and configured so that business units are used as financial dimensions. Finally, we need to model security with the use of Extensible Data Security Framework (XDS).



Now with this, I must warn that there are very specific warnings when using XDS for modeling security. The idea is that it would only be used with Master Data elements, according to best practice. With that warning in mind, my next post on this topic will go into greater detail of how this can be achieved with modeling, and minimum code. Till Next Time!
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