VSLive Redmond - Metro Mania!

I hope everyone is having a great and productive Friday! We are for sure into the swing of summer, with a lot of the U.S. having been baked as of this year. Well to help you stay cool and focused, I suggest attending VSLive Redmond and the sessions that I've dubbed Metro Mania!



I wanted to point out a few sessions from the conference that I think are well worth attending, and wish I could be there myself to learn as well!

Windows 8/WinRT track
The new version of Microsoft’s flagship product brings the Metro user interface and Live Tiles to tablet/slate devices, laptops and even desktop PCs. Apps for Windows 8 can be written with HTML and JavaScript, or XAML and C#/VB .NET, among other options. Visual Studio Live! Redmond will prepare you to build Windows 8 Metro-style apps, and understand the finer points of WinRT that will make them great. This track includes coverage of the following:
• Metro-style apps for Silverlight Developers
• Windows 8 Metro-style enterprise apps
• WinRT for Web developers


Find out more about what you’ll learn during these sessions: http://bit.ly/VSRDWIN

Workshop: XAML UX Design
During this full-day post-conference workshop, Billy Hollis will show you fundamental design principles rooted in the human brain, new ways of storyboarding and prototyping user interfaces, and ways to combine left-brained analytical power with right-brained intuition and design. You’ll see examples of next generation applications, and do interactive exercises to start down the path of creating such applications yourselves.

Find out more about this workshop: http://bit.ly/XAMLUX

If you’re planning to attend Visual Studio Live! Redmond, you can save $400 off the Best Value Package rate! Register today with the code VSLRTU for your discount.

PLUS, Visual Studio Live is running a giveaway now through July 27th to win a conference proceedings workbook from the Redmond event! Find out how to enter here.

Well that's all for this post, I hope that everyone has a great weekend! Check back soon as a whole lot more to come. Till Next Time!

Follow Me @:
    

"Visit the Dynamics AX Community Page today!"

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!
Follow Me @:
    

"Visit the Dynamics AX Community Page today!"

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!
Follow Me @:
    

"Visit the Dynamics AX Community Page today!"

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 - User Experience Guidelines

Recently I recieved an email from a Mara Trygstad, User Experience Designer - Dynamics User Experience Team - Microsoft. This email informed me that the Dynamics User Experience Team has now published the new Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 User Experience Guidelines



These new guidelines are better than we have ever had in Dynamics AX world, and I would really recommend you taking the time to download them, and look them over with your technical and design teams. (Though even Application Folks could benefit from reviewing them as well).

The point of these guidelines is to really give partners, ISV's, and customizing customers a base / reference in which one can review and lean on in order to get good guidelines for designing any user interface that might exist with the new Dynamics AX 2009 release.

Let take for example, Role Centers. These are new to Dynamics AX 2009, and therefore, require special attention by everyone when creating. Well right off these do get special attention, as they live in th 'Whats New' section of the guidelines. The Whats new section is recommended for reading first and then drives you through the rest of the guide.

In looking at Role Centers, we see information like the following:
"A Role Center should answer these questions for the user:

• What is my workload?


• What do I need to do next?


• Are there any urgent actions I need to carry out?


• What is the status of the things I should be most concerned about?

"



So as you can see these have great value, and I fully recommend taking the time to review them. Also, the UX team wants feedback. So if you come across something that you think could help make these better, they want to hear about.

Well check back soon!



"Visit the Dynamics AX Community Page today!"