AX 2012 R2 and PowerView - Part II Extending

What a great day to be alive! I know for a lot of people, including myself, today has special meaning. It's about faith, and remembering that we are finite and need our Creators grace & mercy. So I must first hope that everyone has a blessed good Friday, and you find yourselves doing well. Further, today I wanted to continue the series I started yesterday around Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 & PowerView.

For those that are just reading this post, you can go to Part I of this series located here.: AX 2012 R2 and PowerView - Part I. Having the knowledge gained from that post, we can now continue with extending PowerView for AX 2012 R2 with our own custom cube!.



We start this journey by focusing on where the PowerView data connections and artifacts are stored within Enterprise Portal. You can see this location in the above screen shot from the demo image I'm using as my target. This is located in.: 'http://[site]/sites/DynamicsAX/Power View Reports/'.



Having the location open, we can then target creating a new data source that we will want PowerView to consume. As we can see in the above image, we target a new data source by simply adding one to the document library. Further what's important to not, as seen in the below image, is the connection type and the connection string.



You will not that we have a connection type that is very specific to enabling PowerView artifact creation. This type is called.: Microsoft BI Semantic Model for Power View. Further the connection string is very important as well. This happens to be pointing to a custom SSAS Cube Database and further a custom SSAS cube.



These where both created from the BI Project wizard within Dynamics AX 2012 R2, from a perspective representing the Measures & Dimensions desired. The following is an example connection string that is valid, that you can easily adjust for your own needs.

Provider=MSOLAP.5;Integrated Security=SSPI;Persist Security Info=True;Data Source=localhost;Initial Catalog=sunSalesAnalysis initial;Cube=Sales Analysis

Now having this in place, we can test our connection and save the new data source for PowerView usage. This is the default library where the PowerView managed code looks for data sources to make use of. Going back to the information in the first post on this topic, that means that when an action menu item passing in a data source name as the parameter, it is in reference to the data sources living in this specific document library on Enterprise Portal.



Having done a successful save of the data source, you should see something very similar to the above screen shot. This means that we are ready to move back into Dynamics AX 2012 R2 for completing our extending of PowerView. Like all things in Dynamics AX, this extension should remain within an AOT project.



What we see in the above screen shot is that project, including having highlighted the custom action menu item that will launch our PowerView design process. You will notice that I'm targeting the name given to the data source that lives in the document library on EP. That is the parameter value that will launch PowerView to target the specific custom cube.



Having created the menu item, and launching it, we see in the above image a field list from the custom cube I created from the above mentioned perspective.



This literally took under two hours to complete, from cube to launching into the design space. To further bring home the point that this is a separate cube database, and cube, please reference the below image.



You can see that I have a new cube catalog, or database as well as a custom cube called Sales Analysis. Further you can see in the above image the dimension structure in which we can slice our measure via. Again, this was 100% generated from a perspective within the AOT. Having completed this, we can now create compelling visualizations with PowerView based on the custom cube.



Further having completing such visualizations, saving these to the 'Power View Reports' document library we can surface these and execute them as web parts, or full screen mode.



The above knowledge, mixed with the first post of this series, should enable you to start easily taking full advantage of Power View, well beyond the out-of-the-box cubes. Having these powerful visualizations that allow power users to help complete a BI story for a customer is the icing on-top of the BI cake represented by the Microsoft Stack. This will truly help you to engage your user base and help you down the continue journey of Creating a System of Engagement!

That's all I have for this post. Feel free to comment or leave me any questions you might have. Further, I will back into the cube creation process behind this in a new post, so that there is a complete story from end-to-end for you. Keep in mind, this would work for *any* cube. This does not have to be just the Dynamics AX cubes. Further you can start to see how this can be placed throughout the Dynamics AX forms and user experience. Til Next Time!
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Roll on Role Centers & the AX 2012 R2 Content Wagon Arrives

Today I wanted to bring focus to a few topics that need some spotlight. First off, is the Roll on Role Centers focus, for the title of this post. Specifically, MSDynamicsWorld.com recently posted a piece specifically on how to make Role Centers work for your business.: 5 Ways to Make Microsoft Dynamics AX Role Centers Work for Your Business



From the post.:
"'The improvements in AX 2012 should help partners [guide more customers to use role centers], but there is a mindset [with some partners] that BI is still not the focus, that AX implementations are still all about the transactional aspects of the solution,' according to Brandon George, a Microsoft MVP

'Too many implementations never bring Role Centers into full focus," says George. "Understanding the goal, and purpose - creating a System of Engagement, is a new generational shift for ERP and SCM software. That is the ultimate goal and point of Role Centers. Like all such shifts, it takes thinking about this from the start, proper gap analysis, design, development, and finally execution.'"

Jason and the team at MSDynamicsWorld.com quoted me well, and without a doubt I do believe thoroughly in this focus of creating Systems of Engagement for Microsoft Dynamics AX clients. Further I do believe that even those clients that are fresh on an AX 2009 implementation, has so much to gain from Role Centers, and this focus around engagement of their user base, by role.

I admit I'm thrilled to see more people take up the banner, for the term System of Engagement, and further explaining what that really means. How this should be the focus for what we do within the ecosystem. The ultimate end result actually, that continues to add value. The idea, is we can help enable customers to turn their data into a value stream for them. Creating learning loops with lead & lag data elements, that helps take information, and drive strategic planning for a company. Helping them meet, and exceed their goals!

The next spot light, and something that I'm really glad to see, is Microsoft continuing stepping up the documentation and information effort around Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2. A great summary post by Becky, from the support team highlights some great sources on TechNet & MSDN.: Preliminary Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 content now on TechNet and MSDN!

Further adding to this, is the release of the recent tech conference on AX 2012 R2 video and other content to InformationSource.

Again, it's refreshing to see Microsoft have content at the forefront of the planning. This only helps further build the body of knowledge around Microsoft Dynamics AX, that the ecosystem so desires. Having valid, good content from Microsoft, makes it possible for the pundits of the Dynamics Product line to have cornerstone points and themes in which to work from - spreading in our own voice the value we perceive in each topic we dare tackle.

That's all for this update, check back soon as I have some really interesting topics to talk on. Windows Surface RT use case with Dynamics AX, BigData, BI and more! Till Next Time!
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The value of a BI Product outside of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012

With the a lot of focus this week around Business Intelligence, including being my entire session load, I keep getting asked the same question.: "Why are there so many BI products in the expo hall?" Another flavor of this is "Which BI Products are good candidates to look deeper into."



Before I give my public answer to this, let me first start with this. When you purchase and invest into Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 you are also getting a BI Solution. It true then, when I state that BI is no longer a separate product or project. With the focus around the BI Semantic model, you can achieve Personal, Team & Organisational BI artifact creation without having any other tool.



You can create compelling executive dashboards, as well as other role tailored user experiences, enabled via SharePoint, Office & SQL Server technologies. This can be viewed without having to access the Rich Client of AX 2012 as well. So having a statement that a "CEO never uses AX" is not valid. Just because they don't make use of the rich client, to enter transactions, does not mean they do not use AX. In fact Role Centers should be front and center for the User Experience modeling for you AX investment.

With that said, there still is a valid reason for adding another BI enabling product to your total solution. First thing we have to focus on is the value such a product brings. If it brings relevant, pre-built, focused artifacts that fit into your business model and needs - then that is functional value. Further, just as important as the functional value, is the fact that whatever product this may be - it should never compete with the Microsoft Dynamics AX BI solution.

This means it should compliment the stack of SQL Server+SharePoint+Office. The artifacts it generates should be easily adding as web parts, so that the targeted Role Tailored user experiences are enabled - not replaced.

Microsoft is committed to the continued development and improvement of having this focus, Role Tailored User Experiences - as part of the out-of-the-box offering. So to answer in short: If the product compliments the stack that represent Dynamics AX, and add value for your company, then it's a possible good candidate for adding to your overall BI story your creating for your company.

That's all for this post. Make sure to join me at 4:00 PM Today, in room 604 for the round table discussion on "Understanding What is Available in Standard AX to Meet your BI and Reporting Needs." This will be an open discussion format, meant to engage the audience and have the audience guide and create the conversation.

Make sure to check back soon and often! Till Next Time!
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AX 2012 Personal BI - By Example - Customer Aging III

Well I hope everyone is having a great start to a brand new week! I wanted to write today to continue our focus on the PowerPivot Example for personal BI with AX 2012 - CustomerAging III. For those that are just now getting into this series, the following are links to the previous two post for this topic.

• AX 2012 Personal BI - By Example - Customer Aging I
• AX 2012 Personal BI - By Example - Customer Aging II

Last we left off, we had placed the Open Balance in the values area, as well as having created a computed column that concatenated both the AccountNum - Name, to give us our Customer column. We placed this in the row labels, and we have now what you see in the screen shot below.



Now lets continue this effort, by adding a column label, that will give us our buckets of aging, or aging intervals. In order to do that, we will need to identify from the PowerPivot query, what field best fits this need. Since I know this query well, I know that the field.: StatRepIntervalLine_1_Heading is what we are looking for.



Now that we have placed this as our Column Label, lets take a look at the report area, and see what our data looks like with the change.



As we can see from the above image, we now have our aging category, or buckets - that being made up of the StatRepIntervalLine datasource from the query within AX 2012. This further split up the Customer account information, so we have better insight into what our customer aging really looks like.

Now that we have our aging intervals, lets continue by adding both hortizonal and vertical slicers. These slicers are used to slice the displayed data in our report, so that we can get a dynamic glimpse by the values in which we choose to slice by. This helps make the report very dynamic and interactive within the scope of the workbook itself. Our targets for these slicers are "Customer Group" or CustGroup_1_Name for the vertical slicer, and "Aging Category" or StatRepIntervalLine_1_Heading for the horizontal slicer selection, as seen below.



Like the Value label before, lets change the name of these two slicer columns so they help make the report have a friendly consumption experience. Doing so, should yield an outcome, similar to what you see below.



Now that we have our slicers, and can look at our Customer Aging data in several different ways, let continue to finish out this report, by adding some conditional formatting. With this formatting, the idea is to take and place some visual cue to the data itself. This conditional formatting, as the name implies, will change based on the conditions we set forth.

This Conditional formatting can be added to any Excel workbook, and you launch the setup of such formatting from the Home ribbon within Excel 2010. Below is a screen shot of where to launch this from.



With this, the idea is to give some sort of data based formatting, that gives a nice visual cue to the report. It helps the numbers stand out, so that we can further have a truly refined Customer Aging report, from AX 2012. In adding the conditional formatting, you should end up with an output similar to that we have below here.



Now that we have a nice report, we have basically finished our first series on Personal BI for AX 2012 with PowerPivot. Notice that we actually left the scope of AX 2012 in the first part of this series. Since then we have been working 100% in the scope of PowerPivot & Excel 2010. The Query, when we imported the data, created a snapshot of the data and actually created a cube for us.

This data lives within the workbook, which can support up to 4 GB of size for imported data. The next steps in this would be to take this report and publish it to SharePoint, that would start the next phase in the BISM, which is a focus on Team Based BI, or collarbative BI.

We will pick back up on this series doing just that, and adding this as a WebPart, so we can place on AX 2012 role center pages. We will see how no development is needed, to publish this new personal BI artifact, the excel workbook, to SharePoint. Further we will see how little effort it takes to consume this workbook as a webpart and place it on an AX 2012 Role Center page.

Well I hope everyone has a great week, and check back soon as more to come. Till Next Time!
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Creating a BI Solution for your company with Microsoft Dynamics AX

With the release of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009, the BI capabilities of Dynamics AX really jumped in way of ahead of what you could do before the release. With AX 6.0 coming out next year, this is going to only be expanded upon. With that, you can use Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 now to create compiling BI solutions for your company.

With Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009, the driving factor of BI is actually focused around Role Centers. I think it’s important to understand Microsoft’s vision for Role Centers, and it’s purpose in Dynamics AX, so that you can truly build your company’s BI experience.

Role Centers for Dynamics AX are meant to be the delivery method for the user experience. The idea, is that Role Centers deliver to a given user type or “role” the needed reports, information and links to common forms that help the given user type complete their task(s) within the scope contained of your company’s Dynamics AX investment.



Now I think it’s really important to understand the word usage here. It’s meant to “deliver” a given roles needs from within Dynamics AX. Before, with earlier versions, the workflow for tasks was for a given user to launch Dynamics AX, go to the needed menu, navigate to the forms, reports, etc. to do their given task.

So in versions before Dynamics AX 2009, a user would “go to” the given reports, forms, and other elements within Dynamics AX. This is key to understanding Microsoft’s vision for BI and Role Centers inside Dynamics AX.

Role Centers then, are meant to be how the user experience is delivered to a given role. This, by nature, helps increase productivity and efficiency of a given user role, for performing their needed task, or acting on displayed data for important business decisions.



Now that we have this base understand of the vision and purpose of Role Centers, lets bring back into focus the title of this post, ‘creating a BI solution for your company with Microsoft Dynamics AX’.

With Role Centers as the focused delivery method for delivering the user experience, and keeping with this same thoughts process, then BI elements should be developed and made a part of the roles that make up your companies Role Centers.



So how do you go about doing this? Well like any other module in Dynamics AX, Role Centers should first be setup, configured, deployed. Then from this point, discovery and gap analysis should be performed to determine which roles your company has.

From there, each role should go through its own discovery and gap analysis process, where each role for your company is compared to the ‘out of the box’ role that closely matches the role at hand. The outcome, or deliverable, for this process should be the creation of a scope document(s). These documents should lay out the BI elements needed to enable the role to be a valid, productive, user experience that delivers the roles needs to those assigned to it within Dynamics AX.
Once these scope documents are created, tasks can start being assigned. At this point, you have a lot of options to achieve the scope items for creating the roles for your company.

You can use the Dynamics Reporting Template for Visual Studio 2008 to create SSRS reports that are targeted and used in web parts for display transactional or analytical data. You can create pie, bar or line graphs used to show key metrics. You can use OLAP cube properties like KPI, to delivery dimension based data for viewing and working from. Task list, Cues, Links, and enterprise portal forms to deliver a complete role user experience.

This is all focusing on the platform delivered options for creating roles, and delivering a company BI solution, that pushes information to your users, vs. your users having to go and find the information.

There is also a lot more that can be done from the role center development aspect. This includes having MOSS, or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Keep in mind; this is different than the free WSS, or Windows SharePoint Services offerings that can be used.



When MOSS is used, this opens up the possibility for having Excel Services, and Excel Web Parts to exists as BI elements for your Role Center pages. You can also take advantage of PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint to create dashboards, which make use of Dynamics AX data, and are loaded as part of Role Center experiences.

Going beyond MOSS, you may even take advantage of RIA, or Rich Interactive Application Web Parts built with Silverlight or Flash. This can deliver high end, dynamic web parts that feed from multiple locations into published services that expose Dynamics AX business logic and data.

Moving beyond this, you also have the option to work with one of the many different ISV offerings for BI, like TARGIT BI Suite, iQ4biz, Atlas, etc. Basically any ISV BI offering that can connect to Dynamics AX through the Application Layer or that Dynamics AX can push data to, and that can publish it’s elements as SharePoint web parts for rendering on a Role Center page.

When looking at building a BI solution for your company, with Dynamics AX as your ERP platform, BI is no longer a separate project that happens as a later phase. Now BI is very much a part of a given Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP implementation project, and should be considered as such.

With Microsoft’s continued efforts, and vision for delivering needed BI elements to users, your investment with Microsoft Dynamics AX can help you and your company be more productive, more efficient, and more Dynamic!


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Dynamics AX 2009 - Home Page Icon missing & Role Centers don't load up

Alright, so you have Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 setup and running. You even have the out of the box Role Centers setup. You have started to use them actually, and are getting use to it loading up when you launch into AX. You get to see your task list, any Cue's, KPI's, etc.

Then one day, you open AX and Role Centers don't load. It's the normal Content Pane, of whatever last module you were in. You start to investigate, and realize that when you go to the AX Navigation bar, that the Home Icon is no longer showing up?



Is seeing this, your puzzled, and so you start to check a few things. Making sure the Role Center site is still listed in the Admin module. Checking the EP parameters, etc.

After doing the normal checking, maybe you recall applying for example Dynamics AX Kernel Rollup 4? Or some other update, that would generate a checklist for AX?

See there is this method on the EPGlobalParameters table, called homepageSiteURL(); that is a static method, which looks like this.:



If you noticed the highlighted code, this checks to see if your in the middle of an upgrade, and if so, then return null, or better, ''(empty sting). When this condition is being meant the home page icon will not show up, and Role Centers will not load within Dynamics AX.

To resolve this, you can reload the upgrade checklist, and most likely you will see a step was not completed. Make sure to complete the list, and you should be good to go. If multiple list are left uncompleted, you might have to update the SQL Server DB directly, but once you do Role Center page comes back and you get your home page icon back as well.

That's all for now, but check back as more to come.

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