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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AX 2012 - Enterprise Portal Page Interaction Patterns

I hope everyone is doing good on this Wednesday! I wanted to write, and point out a great resource on Microsoft's MSDN that focus on AX 2012 - EP Page Interaction Patterns. This is a great resource for understanding the UX for EP, and the intended page interaction patterns set forth by Microsoft. When creating new pages, and extending a customers instance via Enterprise Portal, it is very important to have the same look and feel as the rest of EP.

With this in mind, lets check out the following resource page on MSDN: Page Interaction Patterns [AX 2012]



From the post.:
"The page types in Enterprise Portal work together to provide a consistent experience for the user. Some of the pages are displayed in the main browser window, although other pages are displayed in modal dialogs. The following diagrams describe the page interaction patterns for several common scenarios in Enterprise Portal. "

The page goes into walk through's that cover the six different page interaction patterns: View and Edit, Direct Edit, Edit with Additional Details, View and Edit Details, Two-phase Create and Create and submit to Workflow.

What I really want you to take away from this highlight post on this resource is two main points. The first being that of the resource itself so that you can become familiar with the desired page interaction types for EP. This is critical to understand to have valid design artifacts for projects and creating correct deliverable's and user experiences.

The Second point, is tied directly back to those design artifacts for projects. The page interaction type, and therefore this resource page, should be referenced in the design - as well as understood from the functional design point-of-view. Since the role and workload needs to be considered for the design of the deliverable, the page interaction type for such scope should be something that is determined early on.

This is why I think it's very important to understand these page interaction types. It has to be understood, and apart of the design process so that the custom scope that is being delivered fits into the rest of EP for AX 2012. I can't stress this point enough!

Well that's all for this post, but check back soon as I have up-coming book reviews, more on EP design and development, continued BI, and a whole lot more around AX 2012! Till Next Time!
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