AX 2012 - Enterprise Portal Development

Well I hope that everyone is doing well today, and that your finding yourself off to a very productive and Dynamics filled week! I wanted to kick off this week, with a focus back on Enterprise Portal Development for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012.



The above picture comes from the recently released Enterprise Portal Cookbook, that was created by Microsoft's own.: Mey Meenakshisundaram, Principal Group Program Manager and Anees Ansari, Program Manager.

You can access and download the Enterprise Portal Cookbook from the following resource.: Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 White Paper: Enterprise Portal Development Cookbook

Recently I started a series of Enterprise Portal Focused development, around the functional concept of Warranty Management. The following is a list of blog post that I've done around this topic recently.:

• AX 2012 - Enterprise Portal Page Interaction Patterns
• AX 2012 - Common EP Development Task
• AX 2012 - EP Development - Warranty Page
• AX 2012 - EP Warranty Page Navigation
• AX 2012 - EP Warranty Management - AOT, Package & Deploy

In light of the release by Microsoft for the Enterprise Portal Cookbook, I don't have any plans on the continued writing of this series for EP development. Unless there is a request by the community for me to do so, I believe that the cookbook by far is the best resource for Enterprise Portal development.

Instead I will focus any EP related post, in reference to the cookbook, and to start that I would like to point you to page 115 of the Development book referenced.



The above picture is from the resource located here, on MSDN.: Windows Server AppFabric Caching Physical Architecture Diagram

This specific page, from the cookbook mentions how Windows Server AppFabric distributed caching can be used to improve the overall performance in an Enterprise Portal Server Farm. Further I see this as steps that we have pointed to in the past, around truly enabling the scale, and creation of Hybrid Clouds for Microsoft Dynamics AX Customers.

Other such gems exist throughout the cookbook, and so many thanks to Mey and the team for delivering such a quality product around Enterprise Portal Development topic.

That's all the time I have today, but check back soon as we continue our journey on the Microsoft Dynamics AX path. This includes Cloud Enabling technologies, a focus back on BI, and entering into the Summer of Value with Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, and creating a system of engagement for customers. Till Next Time!



Visit Hillstar Business Intelligence (www.HillstarBI.com) in order to truly unlock your data trapped in your Microsoft Dynamics investment. With our value driven business intelligence strategy Hillstar help you transform into a data informed company.


PS: I would like to thank Datamasons for their recent blog post on the recent MVP award. I'm honored to have received the award, and honored to be mentioned by such a great group of people, that make up Datamasons. You can view that blog entry here.: CONGRATULATIONS MVP RECIPIENTS JORIS DE GRUYTER AND BRANDON GEORGE!

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How to Configure SharePoint 2010 for Microsoft Management Reporter 2012

I hope everyone is doing well today. I wanted to take the time, and point out a very specific walk through, that I believe has not gotten a lot of coverage yet. With a focus around reporting & BI for AX 2012, as well as EP Development that we have had - what a great time to talk about how to Configure SharePoint 2010 for Microsoft Management Reporter 2012



The above link does require ParterSource or CustomerSource Access. Further, if you have access, the following is also a direct link to the word document that is referenced in the above resource page.: How to Configure SharePoint 2010 for Microsoft Management Reporter 2012 - Download

If followed correctly, and I mean to the "T", then you can enable - truly - the publishing of Management Reporter - Report artifacts - to your SharePoint instance. This helps further complete the Financial Reporting piece of the story we are focusing on, in our target to use Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 to create a system of engagement.



That's all for now, for this quick highlight but check back soon as so much more to come! Till Next Time!
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AX 2012 - EP Warranty Management - AOT, Package & Deploy

I hope everyone is off to a great start. I wanted to continue our series today, on Enterprise Portal Design & Development, with the functional scope of Warranty Management. So far, we have had two post that has really started this EP dive. First, we focused around creating a new page on our EP instance for warranty management. From there, we were able to move forward, and add the warranty page to the navigation of our EP instance.



So far we have focused our efforts on specific task around SharePoint for page management, as well as task within the AOT for adding our Warranty Page to the Home Web Module, as a sub-Web module. This had both SharePoint and AOT specific task to complete. It's important to understand as we press forward with the focus around our EP journey that management of different aspects happen either within SharePoint or the AOT. What's also important, is that we always try to do whatever we can within AOT. This allows for correct placement of things like business logic, and further allows for us to focus on management and deployment of such created artifacts.



With that in mind, the first part of today's post will focus on adding our EP page, to the AOT itself. The biggest reason for doing such a task, is to enable promotion, version control and deployment options of EP custom artifacts from Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012.

I always like to point out existing resources that help us build upon a topic of focus, and this specific one is not different. We have, on MSDN a nice walk through of adding custom pages for EP to the AOT. How to: Import Pages into the AOT [AX 2012].

From the article.:
"If a page in Enterprise Portal will be packaged and distributed to other Enterprise Portal installations, a copy of the page definition must be imported from SharePoint into the AOT. From the AOT, the page can be packaged for distribution to other Enterprise Portal installations."

As the above states, and why we care to focus on this point, in order to package and deploy a custom page from one instance of AX 2012 to another, we need to have the page's definition living as a part of the AOT. This is a paint point that existed before with EP, and now with AX 2012 - packaging and deployment of EP pages has become easier. Lets now take the time, and do a walk through for adding our custom idbWarrantyManagement page definition into the AOT.

This is a very straight forward task, and it builds upon having successfully tied a URL Web Menu Item, to our custom page. Having done this, we simply need to highlight our URL Web Menu item, right click and then left click on import page.



Having done this, we should now see our page living under the AOT / Web / Web Files / Page Definitions. Keeping with best practice's for Microsoft Dynamics AX we need to make sure and create a new project group, and place our page definition within our idb project, as shown below.



From this point, we are now able to promote the page, along with any other scope we create for our Warranty Management Enterprise Portal Solution. This allows for ease of deployment, to help close our this post we have another MSDN walk through.: How to: Deploy Pages from the AOT [AX 2012]

To finish this then, once we moved our project, via Model File, Model Store or XPO - to a target instance of AX 2012, we can simply highlight the page definition, right click and left click on deploy. It will use the web site information we have setup for Enterprise Portal, contained within the System Administration module.



That's all I wanted to cover on this part of the Enterprise Portal post. We will continue with this series, as we move forward and add tables, classes, and web forms in a View-Edit design pattern choice. This will be to manage our Warranty Management master & reference data. I hope everyone has a great and productive week. Check back soon as more to come! Till Next Time!
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AX 2012 - EP Warranty Page Navigation

I hope everyone is doing well today, and have found yourself being productive in our Dynamics based world we all live in. I wanted to continue our series today on development with EP, and a focus on our functional scope, around Warranty Management.

Last we left off, we had created a new warranty page on our enterprise portal instance. We reviewed the steps of this process, which has its focus primarily on the side of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server - site administration. The idea, for this first focus was around creating a home on EP, in which our functional scope for warranty management will mostly live.



In doing this, we selected the default template or style of our page, in which we will come back to later. Having our page created on enterprise portal is the first step for our new scope. Keep in mind, that in some cases for EP development, the functional scope might not drive you in the direction to have a custom page in which to house the new scope on.

However, with that said, the purpose of this series is to try and cover as much of EP development as possible, that you could possibly run into. Further, as I stated in the start of this series, it helps to add functional depth to such walk throughs.

Lets continue now our focus on this series, by adding navigation so that our warranty page will appear on the EP site. In order to do this, we will need to start by creating a URL menu item within Microsoft Dynamics AX itself. We do this by going to the AOT\Web\Web Menu Items location. In doing this, we will want to create ourselves a web menu item, that points to the URL for our new warranty page.



Now if you get an error message, when trying to create your web menu item, that states.: "Error in Url property error", then this is not a Dynamics AX issues, but rather a Windows issue. There is an older update needed, which my fellow blogging peer Joris point out in his article here.: Enterprise Portal Web URL Lookup Error

After having done this, we should be able to proceed with testing out our new web menu item, to see if we are pointing to the right location. In doing so we should see a screen shot, similar to the below.



Now having done this, we have a couple of options on how to proceed. We could place this as a link on the home page, but instead we want this to be it's own Web Module. We can create a Web module, for our Warranty scope, by now associating the web menu item, into our web modules group, as shown below.



You will notice in the above picture, we have placed are new web module, as a sub web module of the out-of-the-box, Home Web Module from the AOT. This will allow us to integrate nicely, our new scope, into the user experience that is expected when using EP for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. After doing this step, we can deploy our web module element, by highlighting, and right clicking on the web module itself. For good measure, as well as the same for the Home web module, as it's been updated.



A final step, after successfully deploying the web modules, is that an iisreset is required. If you do not do this, your new web module will not be displayed. This makes sense, through the nature of IIS and MOSS, however it's worth noting that it's required.

Now that we have deployed, without error, or the customized Home Web module, as well as our new Warranty Management web module, we should then see in our Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, Enterprise Portal Experience, a similar screen shot to the one below.



With this post, we have now created a navigation for our new warranty management scope, and have it deployed to our Enterprise Portal instance. We can now plan for our next steps, which is a focus around AOT management & deployment of the Warranty Home page, as well as start to add functional scope, and specific web functionality for that scope.

Well that's all for this post, I hope your enjoying our focus on EP development concepts - and that this is bringing value to your AX investment, no matter when you actually read it! Till Next Time!
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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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AX 2012 - Common EP Development Task

I hope everyone is doing well this Friday! I wanted to spend just a little time this morning, to post and setup one of the next series of articles I will be focusing on. With the release of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, Enterprise Portal became a First Class Citizen client for the solution. It has a similar look and feel to Office as well as the Rich client, which helps create a unified user experience across the entire solution.



With this understanding, I wanted to start a series on Enterprise Portal Development, that will go along and merge with the focus I've had recently on Business Intelligence. The two will cross, as we move into Team based BI and Organizational BI.

To be able to kick this off properly, and make use of the great content Microsoft has provide to us, lets look at the following resource.: Common Enterprise Portal Development Tasks [AX 2012]

The above list gives some pretty good information on the common task that take place around the development processes and common task for EP development. This includes creating custom pages, custom forms, and even using workflow with EP! My plan around this series, is to make sure to reference into this resource pages, but also take and add value around it. Having screen shots, food for thought, and any gotcha's and planning points that you need to look at.



With this in mind, I wanted to reference back as well to what I lasted posted about for Enterprise Portal Page Interaction Patterns. We need to keep this in mind, around the design for EP focused development. In order to help start this focus around EP development for an instance of AX 2012 then, lets target our first focus, for what we will develop. With that in mind, lets start with the first page interaction design pattern of View & Edit interaction pattern.

We also need a functional scope that we are trying to achieve with this, to have some meat to this series, similar to what I've done so far with the personal BI series, with a focus on Customer Aging & PowerPivot. With that, lets focus on creating a basic Warranty Management solution for AX 2012 that is 100% focused for Enterprise Portal as it's target.

Well that's all for this Friday, I hope that everyone has a great weekend and your excited about diving into EP. Keep checking back as we continue our focus on BI, Development, Book Reviews, interviews and more for Dynamics AX and Dynamics in general! I will leave you with one more resource, which is the what's new for Enterprise Portal for AX 2012.: What's New: Enterprise Portal in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 [AX 2012]. Till Next Time!
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