Inside Microsoft Dynamics AX

A sneak peek of new mobile apps

2013-03-28T16:15:00Z

Last week at Convergence we unveiled the mobile application experiences for MS Dynamics AX 2012 R2. We have heard a lot of excitement about these new applications and through this blog post we would like to provide you with a sneak preview of these new applications through some videos for the people who could not attend last week's event. These applications will ship later this calendar year as for of the MS Dynamics AX2012 R2 roadmap

These sneak peek videos below cover:

Expense management - from capturing your receipts on your smart phone, to reconciling your receipts on your Windows 8 tablet

Timesheet - capturing your timesheets on either your smart phone or on your Windows 8 tablet

Approvals - approving different workflow documents on your tablet or through any HTML enabled email client

Love to hear your feedback !

/Kees

Introducing new native mobile device experiences

2013-03-18T14:00:00Z

Device form factors and the user interfaces people are using are changing rapidly, and more often than not they are optimized for a touch first experience. In addition, new technologies are enabling new scenarios, where personalized information in context is becoming more important to improve productivity. The investments Microsoft is making in R&D are enabling new scenarios and ways of how our customers work with devices; Microsoft Dynamics is taking full advantage of this work.

We will start enabling new mobile devices experiences for our Microsoft Dynamics AX customers focused on facilitating a broad set of employees, improving their efficiency while 'on to go', and enable them to stay connected to the individual processes. The scenarios will provide native experiences for both smart phones and tablets, and will work 'first and best' on Windows Phone and Windows 8. Per scenario we'll consider other mobile platforms. Our goal is to make these application experiences personal for the user; social, allowing user to get help from your network in context of the task and provide an immersive experience that is engage and action oriented.

The initial set of scenarios we're focusing on are:

Expense management - helps workers both capture and reconcile expenses while traveling, cutting down time and effort meaning getting money back more quickly; helps organizations implement expense policies more seamlessly.
Time entry - capture time on the projects 'on the go', simplifying this administrative burden while providing businesses the opportunity to improve working capital through decreased billing cycle times
Approvals - enable managers to approve business requests like budget requests, time sheets, submitted expense reports and purchase requisition to cut down on administrative task and time spend

The scenarios will break down in the follow companion apps for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012:

App	Description
Expense Capture (phone)	This app will allow you to quickly capture an expense receipt while you're mobile and is a continued development of the app currently already available on the Windows Phone store. In addition, we'll make this app available on iOS and Android mobile OS.
Time Entry (phone)	The time entry app for phone allow you to capture time on projects you've worked on. This app is available on the Windows Phone Store. We'll make this app available on iOS and Android mobile OS.
Approval (through email)	We'll add a capability in the Dynamics AX workflow capability to send HTML emails through any mobile device that include simple HMTL tags. This can enable approvals from any mobile email client that support HTML emails.
Expense Management (tablet)	This rich tablet experience will enable you to capture and reconcile your expense reports while you're 'on the go'
Approvals (tablet)	A richer experience that enables approval of any approval process in Dynamics AX that is enabled through the workflow engine.
Time Entry (tablet)	Enable you capture the time you've worked on projects in a more immersive and rich experience.

The applications itself will be made available in the respective app-store and will be free of charge. The user just needs to be licensed appropriately for the associated processes in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and customer organizations need be current on their maintenance plan. The individual applications listed above will be made available between now and Q4 of CY 2013. We will post more detailed blog posts on each of the applications on this blog once the app is available through the Windows and/or Windows Phone store.

In line with our focus to simplify deployment of business applications we did not create an 'overlay' new application model for mobile or complex new middleware, we're are using existing SOA capability in Microsoft Dynamics AX in combination with the Windows Azure Service Bus for WAN access and secure authentication. Enabling the IT organizations to persist business process integrity across the different mobile devices, without a large IT overhead by deploying additional mobile middle-ware suites.

Most mobile platforms like Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 / RT have strong development tools and SDKs to build compelling native applications. In addition to this, we'll help our customers and partner to more easily build their own scenarios for native device experiences by providing documentation on how to use our APIs. This documentation will be made available on both PartnerSource as well as CustomerSource.

We're excited to bring these new experience to our customers, love to hear your thoughts

/Kees

Innovations in Process Manufacturing

2013-02-28T16:00:00Z

Back in October 2012 we gave you a sneak peek into the then soon-to-be released capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2. With this latest release we’ve continued to focus on innovation and productivity for workers in a multitude of industries. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s focus on the benefits that process manufacturing companies will receive.

Manufacturers such as Peet’s Coffee and Tea or Amalie Oil Company have bits and pieces of discrete, process, and even lean manufacturing processes throughout their organizations. If you have mixed-mode manufacturing needs then you too may find the new “out-of-the-box” capabilities in R2 extremely beneficial. If you’d also gain value from improvements in your process manufacturing efforts, let’s take a look at three key process manufacturing enhancements within the R2 release:

Potency Management

The key to success for many process manufacturing companies is how well it is able to manage variability. This variability can come in the form of raw materials, work in process, or finished goods. Within process manufacturing environments such as chemicals, food, beverage, metals, paper, and life sciences this variability is often called by different names. In chemicals it may be called potency, in life sciences it may be called efficacy, and in food it could be called brix (sugar concentration), butterfat in milk, or alcohol percentage.

Potency management allows us to effectively gauge and value the strength of a specific material. For example, a 90% potent acid is more valuable than a 50% potent acid because you need less of it. Orange juice with an 18% brix content is sweeter than a lower percentage content, meaning you’d need less filler to hit your sweeteners targets.

Potency tracking and management also allows features such as batch balancing. In the food industry where a manufacturer is producing different varieties of yogurt, managing the butterfat content of milk is key.
Sometimes there is a variation in the percentage needed, and the worker needs to perform a calculation to ensure accurate inventory usage. With automated batch balancing capabilities in the R2 release, workers can now easily handle these computations and ensure high product quality, reduce wastes, and lower costs.

Basic Sequencing

Let me first clarify the term “sequencing” as it might be better referred to as “basic sequencing” because in R2, the production planning capabilities focus on sequencing execution versus optimization functionality that would be found in more advanced scheduling solutions. With R2 sequencing we have the ability to run a production schedule based on the characteristics of an item versus simply using a lot number. This added flexibility grants production planners in both process manufacturers and even traditional consumer product goods companies the ability to minimize changeovers in their schedule. With basic sequencing we can assign 4 different characteristics at the item level, which define its sequence such as: allergen content, pack size, acidity, and so on.

To further explain the principals of basic sequencing I’d like to share an example of paint manufacturing requirements. When producing paints we deal with a variety of water versus oil-based, colors, and obviously packaging sizes. Even with this small list of variables we’ve detailed – which aren’t all inclusive in the paint industry – we can see how we’d need basic sequencing functionality:

The first process we’d look at is what type of paint this is…namely is it an oil or water-based paint. They run their oil-based paint production on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.
After each of these production runs the line requires a special clean out and inspection to be performed.
They next want to run the production line by color, with white first, followed by yellow, green, blue, red, and then ending with black. The progression in paint colors is based off of the need for additional pigments and the potential cross contamination issue. In layman’s terms, it’s a lot easier to deal with potential pigment dyes from previous runs in the black color than if they ran the white color last.
Finally paint is packed by size: quarts, gallons, and then 5 gallon barrels last. This basic sequencing directly within Dynamics AX 2012 R2 gives them the best schedule without having to buy an optimization tool, and increases throughput and efficiency.

Lot Inheritance (Lot Genealogy)

Let’s now look at Lot Inheritance features within Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2. Some companies will call this Lot Genealogy which is a probably a misnomer because the initial version of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 already had solid tracking and tracing capabilities at the lot and sub-lot level. Lot inheritance is used with industries such as primary metals, semiconductor, A&D, paper, life sciences (especially biotech), and others. In the R2 release it allows individual item attributes to be based off a set of attributes originating from a batch.

Here’s an example: In primary metals I can take a steel beam (or roll stock) and attach all the dimensional and metallurgy characteristics (tensile strength, hardness, coating) as its attributes. If I take that stock steel beam and cut it in half, I want the downstream co-products to inherit most of the dimensional characteristics (like gauge), all the metallurgy characteristics, but not the width or length. This saves me an enormous amount of data entry typically required in documenting and testing the downstream co-products, and enhances the lot track and trace (genealogy) by tracing the heat number, critical in primary metals. In biotech a similar example is passing the blood type down to the 1000 cell cultures produced from the parent. There are many examples we can discuss but this feature is limited only by the creativity of the pre sales or implementation consultant.

The three enhancements we’ve just reviewed within Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 demonstrate a commitment to and focus on the process manufacturing ndustry. They are just a few of the many benefits Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 can bring to you and your organization. With R2 we are now delivering global planning and operations, enhanced execution capabilities, real-time insight and operational visibility—all within a single solution, enabling you to connect to your customers, suppliers, and employees. Now, it’s your turn to be a find out what it’s like to be a Dynamic Manufacturer!

How Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 helps optimize talent in organizations

2013-02-20T06:44:00Z

If you are like most HR professionals, it’s a challenge to focus on what matters to you most: strategic HR. Managing the day-to-day administrative tasks that employees and managers should be able to take care of themselves is bogging you down. In my conversations with HR professionals, two of the most time consuming, non-strategic issues they would love to solve are:

Having multiple, disparate systems to manage talent, which causes frustration and is just plain inefficient
With so many systems, it’s confusing to employees and managers to know what solution to use to manage their human resource needs

As most already know, Microsoft Dynamics AX is a business solution that supports industry-specific and operational business processes. What you may not be aware of is that Microsoft Dynamics AX includes a single, unified Human Resources solution that encompasses Core Human Resource Management and Talent Management.

Core Human Resource Management:

Centrally manage your workforce across your organization eliminating duplicate data, reducing errors and saving time and money. Core Human Resource Management provides flexible organization and position structures while tracking historical and future changes across the workforce, enabling streamlined processes such as hiring, transitioning, and off-boarding employees. This includes:

Personnel Administration - Share workers (employees and contractors), applicants, organizations (e.g. – departments, teams), jobs, positions, and competencies throughout your organization. Retain employment history, track injuries and illnesses, record education, skills, certificates, tests, courses, work experiences, and track loaned equipment.
Organization Administration - Maintain jobs, positions, and organization structures (hierarchical, matrix, and team-based). Formalize position maintenance with personnel actions and an option of approvals, and also optionally track budget/cost information.
Benefits Administration - Define benefit plans and assign benefits based on eligibility rules to individual employees or through mass assignment.
U.S. Payroll - Utilize U.S. Payroll that works seamlessly with HR, Financials, and other components of your Microsoft Dynamics AX solution. Read my prior U.S. Payroll blog to learn more.
Employee Self-service - Empower employees with the ability to maintain competencies and personal information, apply for jobs, register for courses, maintain performance goals, enter absence requests, view pay statements, and more.
Manager Self-service – Give managers the ability to manage recruitment projects, approve absences and expenses, and more.
Business Intelligence & Analytics - Take advantage of a single source of truth for your employee data enabling exceptional decision making with contextual
analytics.

Talent Management:

Attracting, developing, and retaining the workforce is critical for meeting the dynamic needs of your organization. Talent Management provides a solution to help you manage your most valuable resource. This includes:

Recruiting - Recruit top talent by posting job openings both internally and externally, and share applicants across the enterprise providing a powerful tool for any recruiter.
Competency Management - Define competencies for positions and map them to internal and external candidates and employees to ensure the right people are in the right positions.
Compensation Management - Create fixed and variable compensation plans, which includes grade, band and step compensation structures, which can also be mass adjusted.
Performance Management - Enable pay for performance based on employee and organizational performance goals.
Course Management - Offer the ability to initiate learning, define training course information, manage attendee signup lists, waiting list, withdrawals, and also evaluate courses.

The Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 release includes several improvements that help you manage the talent in your organization

Core Human Resource Management:

Additional position control when managing and budgeting for positions as well as mass position date-effective updates
Benefits eligibility control with rules engine so that employees can only be enrolled in benefits for which they are eligible
Tracking of employee screenings such as drug or medical
U.S. Payroll that works seamlessly with Microsoft Dynamics AX HR and Financials

Talent Management:

Role-tailored information at your fingertips with enhanced HR role centers
New tests and qualifications tracking
Mass adjustments to compensation

With the enhanced HR business processes and capabilities delivered in a single solution, HR professionals can now accomplish more and focus their extra time on strategic HR initiatives. What are the things that keep you up at night relative to Human Resource Management? Are you considering making changes in your organization where you think we may be able to help? I welcome the dialog and any questions you may have about our Human Resource solution.

Dan Schuster - Sr. Product Marketing Manager - Microsoft Dynamics ERP

Ease planning and control of complex financial budgeting processes with Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2

2013-01-25T03:16:00Z

Financial executives within organizations face the continual challenge of optimizing working capital (a set, and often decreasing amount year over year) and planning for the future (with an ever-increasing demand for more services). The struggle that accompanies the financial budgeting process comes not only from various departments, but from all levels throughout the organization. Whether it is for sales, marketing, R&D, manufacturing, IT, project or capital expenditures, the demand for budgets must be effectively prioritized by financial executives and allocated carefully to ensure maximum business results that benefit the needs of multiple teams.

These pressures ultimately bring into question the feasibility of plans, budgets, and forecasts. To meet these needs, organizations must work to improve the efficiency and shorten the planning cycle. Yet, even today, many organizations continue to struggle, which often comes down to three issues that must be resolved:

Time involved in the process

The length of time it takes to complete the budgeting and forecasting process is too long. A drawn out budgeting process reduces employee productivity because plans, budgets, and forecasts keep employees from executing other important tasks. This reduction in productivity exacerbates managers, which makes them unwilling to devote the time needed to produce an accurate projection.

I continue to hear about organizations that have implemented sophisticated best-of-breed tools. Tools with unfamiliar interfaces require additional training, or even worse, frustrate users to the point that they revert back to the one tool everyone knows – Microsoft Excel. Microsoft Excel continues to be the standard budgeting tool, yet as a standalone tool it does not address larger process orchestration requirements (e.g., workflow technology), so an organization can end up with multiple versions of the truth.

Reacting to unforeseen events

Organizations are facing an increasing risk of not being able to react to unforeseen events. For example, there are employees who are privy to data and information (actual expenditures, past budgets, human resources, and fixed assets) that managers may not be aware of. And there are complex external issues (fiscal cliff or shifts in the political landscape) that managers must also take into consideration.

Visibility into these factors, while fostering thorough communication throughout the organization, is essential to both the accuracy of the budget and the ability of the organization to improve efficiency. This ensures that all unforeseen events are considered, and employees know exactly what they need to do to produce plans that are actionable. More importantly, this visibility gives the organization the ability to adjust budgets accordingly.

Alignment within the organization:

The Aberdeen Analyst Insight report “Financial Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting for the SME,” finds that “(i)mproving the alignment of planning and budgeting with corporate goals is the second leading pressure driving improvement (31%).”

Successful alignment works both ways. The plans must be tailored and adjusted to meet the organization’s goals and, at the same time, these goals need to be realistic. Everyone needs to buy-in and agree not only upon the process but also the resulting budget.

Graphic: Budget Planning Hierarchy

With the release of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 we address these issues in the budgeting process by combining the power of Workflow and Organization models in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 with the power of Microsoft Excel. We have a quick video of how a Dynamic Budgeting Professional addresses these issues on our website.

In this release organizations can utilize Microsoft Excel templates (thus minimizing mistakes) and a central data store for one version of the truth. In addition, you can do “what if” scenarios, which enables you to change analysis to adjust to those unforeseen events and implement changes quickly. Organizations can design structured workflows to create greater alignment so that the process can be less intense and resource demanding. For further justification of budget requests, Microsoft Word documents can be attached directly to the budget to help explain requests.

Furthermore, with the release of budget planning and control in this release you can:

Associate budget planning processes with budget cycles, ledgers, and organization hierarchies.
Analyze and update budget plans by using multiple scenarios, and then automatically route the budget plans together with worksheets, justifications, and attachments for reviews and approvals utilizing the workflow capabilities.

Graphic: Budget Planning Workflow to design and assign specific actions

Consolidate multiple budget plans at one level of the organization into a single parent budget plan at a higher level in the organization. You can also develop a single budget plan at a higher level in the organization and allocate the budget to lower levels of the organization.

Whether your budget process involves Microsoft Excel or a best-of-breed tool, I hope this post shows how Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 can help you and your organization reduce the time spent in the budgeting process, while allowing you to adjust for unforeseen changes and greater alignment across your organization. Visit the Public Sector section of the Microsoft Dynamics website to learn more.

Todd Bergeson – Sr. Product Marketing Manager – Microsoft Dynamics ERP

Better business insight with Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2

2013-01-11T16:39:00Z

Many organizations struggle with providing business insight in a timely manner as resource-constrained IT departments can’t keep up with the requests from business users. Far too often users are spending too much unproductive time creating manual reports that are static and outdated.

Facing ever-accelerating change and the pressure from more prevalent global competition, it is more important than ever that organizations have instant access to up-to-date financial and operational performance to spot trends and identify challenges so they can act early.

In previous versions of Microsoft Dynamics AX we enabled business intelligence as part of the ERP experience. The business user can access important information throughout the solution, via Role Center pages, which are dashboards that provide an overview of information that pertains to a user’s job function and by using Microsoft BI technology such as Microsoft Excel.

In Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 we further improved the BI capabilities by providing users with pre-built, extensible analytic capabilities and tools. These tools help support better decision making by enabling users to easily create, share and explore rich analytical reports with interactive visualizations on their own.

The BI enhancements in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 enable users to:

Monitor business performance with enhanced pre-built content including a total of 15 SQL Server Analysis Services cubes and 45 Role Centers. Users can choose from more than 80 pre-defined KPIs with the ability to drill down into details and supporting information. New charting capabilities support visualization of large volumes of transactional and aggregated business data in Role Centers.
Analyze data by using rich visualization and interactive data exploration capabilities right from the role center with embedded Power View reports.

Perform ad-hoc analysis and discover new insights from within the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 client based on pre-defined data cubes with Power View*, the highly interactive, familiar, browser-based data exploration, visualization, and presentation tool.
Explore and share business insights without help from IT by securely accessing and mashing-up data from the business solution using the improved OData providers and data services from Windows Azure Marketplace in Microsoft BI technology such as Microsoft Excel.
Extend business overview information with external data, such as industry average comparison for better performance monitoring and improve accountability and collaboration by adding user’s real-time presence information.

Do you want to learn more about the BI enhancements in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 and how business users can gain more insights? Here are additional resources for you to explore:

Video: Provide Inspiring Insights
Video: Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 launch video for the Dynamic CFO featuring business insights for everyone to drive business value

For more technical details please visit:

The data visualization and animation helps users of all levels to better understand their business. I’ve seen many great business scenarios that allows users to spot issues and trends in their data. I think the new BI capabilities are easy to use and fun to work with. I invite you to take a look at these new BI capabilities. Let me know what you think.

Yvonne Haarloev
Senior Product Marketing Manager Microsoft Dynamics ERP

(*) Disclaimer: Power View is an ad-hoc data exploration and visualization experience in Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services. To use PowerView reports with Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 data stored in Business Intelligence Semantic Model multidimensional mode, you must have a generally available release of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 that supports Power View for multidimensional models installed on your system. As of December 1, 2012, Microsoft SQL Server 2012 that supports Power View for multidimensional models is not generally available. However, the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 that supports Power View for Multidimensional Models Community Technology Preview (CTP) release is available for download if you want to test the Power View reporting capability. You should not test or use this CTP in a live operating environment unless Microsoft permits you to do so under another agreement. Click here (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35822) for more information on the CTP release. All features and dates are preliminary based on current expectations and are subject to change without notice. The information herein is for informational purpose only and represents Microsoft’s current view as of the date of this release. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft.

Official Dynamics AX 2012 R2 Content (update) - Where is it, and how can you find out about updates?

2012-12-01T00:37:00Z

Hi everyone,

Margo Crandall from the documentation team here. We've recently posted more content to support Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2, so we wanted to update this blog post as well. We've announced the sections of content that have been updated on the AXSupport blog, so refer there for specific details. This blog post has been updated to include:

A list of the languages that we are shipping Help for in R2.
Information about our new Inside Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 book
An updated list of resource pages

If you'd like a printable overview of where our help is, and how it is organized, take a look at the Help and Resources Datasheet for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012.

This blog post still explains the different types of documentation for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, where you can find our content, what we’re working on now, what we’ve changed from previous versions, and how you can communicate with us.

/Margo

Where can you find our content?

Content for Application users - Application user content includes information on configuring modules, performing tasks within a module, product-wide features, and productivity tools.

The most up-to-date content for users is on TechNet, in the Application Users section.
Some content is only available on TechNet, such as the Report Catalog.
The same content, current for the released version of the product, is available from within the client at Help > Application user Help.
From within the client, you can also use the web search page (WebSearchAX) that is available from Help > Application user Help on the web.
Context-sensitive help is also available for forms in the client and in Enterprise Portal.

The Application User Help can also be customized for your organization by your partners, or internally, by adding topics to the Help server. For more information, see the Help server topic on TechNet.

Content for System administrators - System administrator content includes information on deployment, patching, and upgrade, managing different types of servers, and security.

The most up-to-date content for system administrators is on TechNet in the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 System Administrators section.
From within the client, use the web search page (WebSearchAX) that is available from Help > System Administrator Help on the web.

Content for Developers- Developer content includes information on using the IDE and debugging tools, Visual Studio integration, User experience guidelines, and reference content for X++ and APIs.

The most up-to-date content for users is on MSDN in the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 for Developers section.
From within the Development Workspace in the product, use the web search page (WebSearchAX) that is available from Help > Developer Help on the web.

WebSearchAX

Although the web search page (WebSearchAX) is called from within Microsoft Dynamics AX, it is a website that you can bookmark and use externally. It enables you to search for content by user role, product version, module, and topic type. You can also include blogs, community, code samples and white papers in the search results.

Installable Help updates and localizations

Installable Help updates and localizations for the application user help are available. These updates include translated core feature content, and regional content translated into the appropriate language or languages.

Help updates are available in the following languages:

Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch (Netherlands), Dutch (Belgium), English (Australia), English (Canada), English (India), English (Ireland), English (Malaysia), English (New Zealand), English (Singapore), English (South Africa), English (UK), English (US), Estonian, Finnish, French (France), French (Canada), French (Belgium), French (Switzerland), German (Germany), German (Austria), German (Switzerland), Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Italian (Switzerland), Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish (international), Spanish (Mexico), Swedish, Thai

All application user Help that has been released to TechNet in English since we first released Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 is also included in the Help update that ships with Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2.

Inside Microsoft Dynamics AX (book)

We've published Inside Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, with Microsoft Press. The book provides developers with holistic, in-depth information about developing for Microsoft Dynamics AX in a single place.

The following graphic shows where our in-product content resources can be found:

What content can you find on the Community site?

Community.dynamics.com hosts blogs, forums and videos. We have also recently added resource pages that provide information to help you resolve top customer issues. Current resource pages include:

To keep up with newly-released and updated resource pages, on the Community site you can subscribe to the RSS feed for the Resource Page blog.

The following graphic describes the content that you can find on our public sites.

What content can you find on PartnerSource and CustomerSource?

PartnerSource and CustomerSource host licensing information, KB articles, hotfixes and updates, and allow you to submit support requests. PartnerSource also provides partner-specific content. From PartnerSource and CustomerSource you can also search for links to content on TechNet, MSDN, and the Download Center.

To find hotfixes and updates on CustomerSource, start from the following pages:

What content can you find on InformationSource?

InformationSource is a site that provides services that enable customers and partners to deliver predictable implementations of Microsoft Dynamics AX. It provides resources to enable you to analyze, design, configure and customize Microsoft Dynamics AX by following best practices determined by the Microsoft Dynamics AX solution architecture team.

For customers and partners, the site provides supported services that can be used to improve implementations, such as the Application Analysis Tool, Intelligent Data Migration Framework, Security Upgrade Advisor, and Code Upgrade Service.

The site also provides access to core concepts about application architecture and implementation strategies, in the form of the following content types:

Datasheets Two page documents that describe a feature. Intended for pre-sales conversations.
Elevator pitch PowerPoint slides Slide decks that describe a core concept or feature.
White papers Core concept and design insight papers describe features and decisions that were made as the features were designed.
Videos How-to videos that demonstrate how to perform a task.

For partners, the site provides answers to commonly asked questions from Requests for Proposals (RFPs) in the Q&A search.

How is the Help for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 different from the Help for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009?

Our goals for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 were to provide customization opportunities for end user help, to improve discoverability by providing all of our help content on Microsoft’s web properties, and to make content available more frequently. Following this strategy, we have eliminated most compiled help (.chm) files from the product.

Customizable Application Help

The Help server provides a client/server approach to help delivery by storing the help files on a central server, so that they don’t need to be installed on all client desktops like .chm files.

The Help server enables you to:

Publish an HTML file to a web server when you want to add or change a topic.
Deploy and manage Help from a centralized location.
Apply Help updates that are provided by Microsoft without deleting your customized topics.

Improved Discoverability

Developer Help is exclusively on MSDN.
System administrator Help, except for form Help, is exclusively on TechNet.
Application user Help is both on TechNet and in the product.

More Frequent Updates

Additions and updates to content on MSDN and TechNet are made regularly.
Microsoft ships Help updates that you can install on your Help server as part of Cumulative Updates, and the Feature Pack.

Who is the documentation team?

We are a group of nearly 40 writers and editors, located on the Microsoft Bellevue, Fargo, and Copenhagen campuses. Our team is passionate about providing the right documentation for customers and partners who are implementing, customizing, developing applications for, or using Microsoft Dynamics AX. We are part of the research and development team.

What is the documentation team working on now?

We've finished most the content that we plan to complete for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, and the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 release and are shifting to focus on developing content for other upcoming releases. In the content update posts on AX Support, you'll be seeing far fewer new topics, and a larger percentage of updated topics. The new content is available through search on TechNet and MSDN, or you can find the lists of the updated topics (tagged as Content) on the AXSupport blog. The new and updated application user Help topics are also included in Help updates that shipped in the R2 Release.

What do we need from you?

Feedback! We really need to know what you like, and what you don’t. Ratings are nice, but comments really help us improve.

The location of the feedback links on TechNet and MSDN vary by which view you have set in your preferences.

In Classic view, the default for TechNet, you can provide feedback on any topic by clicking the Feedback control at the top right of the page:

In Lightweight view, the default for MSDN, the feedback link is at the bottom of the page, next to the copyright statement:

In ScriptFree view, the feedback link is back at the upper right.

You can also always email us at adocs@microsoft.com—let us know if something is missing, or doesn’t meet your needs.

Where can you hear from us?

We’re starting to be more visible on social media, beginning with posting here. Approximately 10 times a year, we’ll also be posting notes about which content we’ve recently published and updated on the AX Support blog.

You can also follow us on twitter (AXContent for the team, or MSMargoc for me personally), and we’re also active on LinkedIn groups.

The New Retail Reality – are you ready?

2012-11-16T20:29:00Z

Consumers today are more sophisticated, technologically savvy, and digitally connected than ever before. As a result, they are both more empowered in how, when, and where they shop and more demanding in what they expect from their shopping experiences. It is no longer enough for a retailer to be able to sell in multiple channels such as brick and mortar, call centers, and online. They need to seamlessly integrate these channels and offer personal and differentiated experiences that enable a consumer to effortlessly move across channels or quickly risk becoming obsolete. This ability in today’s terms is called omni-channel retail.

Drilling a little deeper, what does a seamless and integrated shopping experience mean for today’s consumer and for today’s retailer? For today’s consumer, it means having a targeted promotion follow them from Facebook to their mobile phone to the brick and mortar store where it can be redeemed. It means being able to order online and select a store for pick up, or purchase in store and return it online. It means being able to accrue loyalty points irrespective of where they made their purchase. And for today’s retailer, it means merchandising – inventory, pricing and promotion and more – tightly integrated across all channels. It means having 360-degree cross channel visibility in real-time so they can strategically interact with their customer.

At the core of Microsoft’s retail solution is Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2. With the powerful enhancements being delivered in this latest release, Microsoft Dynamics for Retail offers a fully integrated end-to-end solution enabling retailers to seamlessly manage all their channels from a single solution powered by a single commerce engine. And, with the addition of a fully integrated web store-front powered by Microsoft SharePoint 2013 and natively integrated to Microsoft Dynamics for Retail, the unique value extends all the way to the online customer experience. This unique e-commerce solution delivers one of the industry’s first native integration of web store-front and digital content management to purpose built order fulfillment, shipping, payment, catalog and more on the back end. Microsoft Dynamics for Retail is the engine behind a powerful SharePoint online experience – resulting in experiences that are timely, accurate, and reliable like never before.

This powerful e-commerce solution from Microsoft offers retailers a ground-breaking solution not only in its integration and control, but also in the technology on which it is based. While most e-commerce solutions today are engineered as web pages with search, the Microsoft solution is actually built on search - meaning that web pages are dynamically built as the solution incorporates managed content, authored content, item detail from Microsoft Dynamics and more. The solution doesn’t stop there as historical clickstream data is continuously incorporated to impact recommended items and the very way content is presented to the consumer – driving an adaptive and tailored experience made more relevant with each page view.

So what is the impact to the retailer in deploying this next generation e-commerce solution? Actually, with so much power and so little coding; a single management platform; consistent technology stack; and native integration managed by Microsoft – the retailer’s only struggle may be determining whether it’s their customers or e-commerce team who benefits most.

The Dynamic Retailer is connected without compromise; personally relevant; agile and opportunistic. Consumers expect nothing less, and the technology on which retailers build their foundation for the future will determine if they can deliver on their brand promise and thrive in today’s new retail reality. Microsoft is committed to delivering a complete vision for retail built on innovation and a unique value proposition that delivers on the promise of true omni-channel retail.

Michael Griffiths - Global Director Retail & Distribution

Processing U.S. Payroll with Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2

2012-11-06T16:55:00Z

In case you’ve been wondering, or exploring, what options are available to help you run U.S. payroll, we are introducing a new payroll solution in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2. The upcoming MS Dynamics AX 2012 R2 release includes new capabilities to help organizations manage their talent globally. In addition to these global enhancements, this release includes a payroll solution to address U.S. tax regulations and requirements.

In general, organizations only have two options when it comes to payroll: you can outsource it or manage the process in-house. When outsourcing payroll you may save time and resources but your sensitive personal and financial data is not fully under your control. What’s more, this option may or may not deliver the savings relative to the effort it takes to manage the process.

When processing payroll in-house your data is fully under your control. The main consideration is the resources necessary to run the process internally.

Whether you are in the public sector or private industry in the U.S. and you want better control of your payroll data and process, then I invite you to take a look at the new payroll solution available in this release . It is tightly integrated with other areas of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 (such as Human Resources, Financials) and enables you to do your payroll in-house. Whenever such highly sensitive information is at stake, processing payroll in-house helps to ensure your employees are paid on a timely, accurate basis while giving you peace of mind.

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 provides a comprehensive payroll solution:

Enables a one-time setup of benefits, deductions, fringe benefits, workers compensation, and general liability insurance via a seamless integration with Human Resource capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics AX. Easily facilitates printing of pay checks and/or direct deposit pay into employees’ savings and checking accounts through a similar seamless integration to Financial Management capabilities. In addition, this release streamlines your ability to distribute costs to the necessary accounts, and to post payroll.
Runs the payment generation process to have the payroll solution do the necessary deductions, contributions, as well as most federal, state, and local tax calculations – gross to net calculation.
Enable employees to view their pay statements on a self-service basis in the Enterprise Portal in MS Dynamics AX 2012 R2.
Easily records both regular pay (such as salary) and exception-based earnings (such as paid time off).
Helps you manage future changes as well as track historical changes by providing a complete picture over time when you date effective data across Payroll. For example, allowing your payroll staff to work ahead and make future-dated changes when possible saves critical time when running the payroll process. The date effective functionality also provides the ability to have mid-pay period compensation rate changes as frequently as necessary.

Because payroll requirements differ significantly by geography, if you are a customer outside of the U.S. that is looking for a payroll solution, please contact your local partner or Microsoft representative.

What are your top priorities when it comes to U.S. Payroll? I think we have developed a compelling Payroll solution to help organizations run their U.S. payroll in-house. Leave a comment, and let’s talk.

Dan Schuster

Sr. Product Marketing Manager – Microsoft Dynamics ERP

A sneak peek tour: 4 Business Benefits of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2

2012-10-23T17:30:00Z

This week we've reached an important milestone – disclosure of the details of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 to our technical community. If you’re @ the AX Technical Conference you have a unique opportunity to learn about these details firsthand. I am also happy to share that general availability of this release to our customers and partners is planned for December 1, 2012.

What’s new in R2? We’ve made a significant investment to expand the capability of AX across the application footprint. When I think about the enhancements made in this release, I’ve grouped them into 4 focus areas, which are highlighted below (we'll continue to provide more specifics on each of the areas in subsequent posts on this blog):

First and foremost, continued investments in new functionality for our focus industries and administrative processes. We are expanding functional capabilities to help customers address business issues, for example:

Manufacturing - Improve manufacturing operations for process manufacturing. In this release we'll introduce new capability for management of potency, traceability and product batch sequencing to help our process manufacturing customers streamline their operations. Potency management enables management of the concentration of an active ingredient through the entire manufacturing process. In addition, the improvement of traceability where important attributes are generated and captured during the manufacturing process can also be transferred to subsequent lots.
Retail - Manage your assortments across channels in your retail operations. New multi- and cross-channel capabilities for retail organizations, including catalogue management, cross-channel workflows, and integrated sales channel management will include a new “out of the box” web storefront offering based on the new version of SharePoint 2013 which enables our customers to provide modern and integrated web commerce experience across different devices to their customers and is fully integrated into Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012.
Public Sector - Simplifying the financial budgeting process in public sector organizations. By combining the power of Microsoft Excel with the power of the workflow engine inside of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, we will support new capabilities in budget formulation with workflow approvals, flexible tracking, and reporting. R2 will enable complex budgetary requirements using Microsoft Excel as well as integration with financial budget transactions, position and payroll data to enable budgetary control.
Professional Services - Improve utilization of resources across your organization. Improvements in the intercompany scheduling capability of project resources will specifically benefit services organization with resources and projects across multiple entities and will improve utilization of your resources.
All - Gain efficiency in workforce management. We continue to invest in the Human Capital Management (HCM) capabilities to improve employee lifecycle management, including enhancements in position control with tighter budget integration. In addition, we'll include support for payroll in the US, ensuring compliance with US taxation and payroll reporting regulations.

Improve business insights for all users in the context of their work, which has been a key focus for us over the past couple of releases. This ranges from easy operational reporting, to measuring business performance through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and benchmarking as well as to providing deep analysis and actionable insights powered by new rich visualizations technology. Specifically, in this release we focused on:

New and updated KPI content - where we deliver a set of new and updated KPIs that will come with the SQL BI cubes shipped with the release. These KPIs will surface on the different role centers.
Enabling the usage of the new Power view technology introduced in Microsoft SQL Server 2012. This will help users to discover new insights through a highly interactive and familiar data visualization technology.

Increase global reach and simplify international operations – Microsoft Dynamics AX is being used by customers across geographies - customers that themselves utilize Microsoft Dynamics AX to manage their operations across many different geographies. In this release we've:

Increased the global reach of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 by adding localization for 11 new markets (Brazil, Czech Republic, China, Estonia, Hungary, India, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Russia), extending the reach for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 to support 36 localizations worldwide.

Figure 1: Arabic and Japanese UI

Reduced complexity for those organizations that increasingly operate their business throughout multiple countries by simplifying centralized deployments. Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 already supports sharing of data, but now (as we talked about in a previous post) we've introduced the concept of data partitioning, which enables our customers to isolate data of individual units/companies, while still reaping the benefit of a shared infrastructure.

Continue to simplify the application lifecycle for our customers. This goes from simplifying single instance international ERP deployment scenarios up to simplifying setup and functional implementation with new and improved lifecycle services. Parallel to this release we will update existing lifecycle services (including updates to our RapidStart services) as well as provide new services to our customers and partners. Some other examples:

Code Analyzer will help analyze the performance of custom code based on rules in the design phase of an extension by customers or partners.
Data Migration Framework will support import, export and migration of data to/from Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 in the deployment phase. It will cover over 20 scenarios including customer, vendor, product, employee, BOM, open sales and purchase order data, which can be extended by partners and customers.
Diagnostics Framework will assist by analyzing data collected from the installation’s servers based on rules in the maintenance phase of your Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 environment(s).

Just covering these highlights of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2, you start to realize the significance of this release, as it brings value across the board for many customers, both in their existing as well as new markets. I am specifically excited to see the release of these innovations in countries like Brazil, Russia, India and China, not only to serve our many great customers in these countries but also to help our customers in developing markets with their international operations.

I read a recent McKinsey research showing that the largest companies headquartered in developed economies currently derive only 17% of their revenues from emerging markets, even though these markets represent 36% of global GDP. Moreover, despite advantages in scale, technology, and access to capital, multinationals often lose out to more nimble local competitors. There are huge opportunities still untapped – significant growth predicted, GDP expanding from $12 to $30 trillion by 2025 – and 2 billion new consumers to enter the world market!

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 is an excellent solution to help you tap into this opportunity. Are you ready?

/Kees

Inside Microsoft Dynamics AX

A sneak peek of new mobile apps

Expense management - from capturing your receipts on your smart phone, to reconciling your receipts on your Windows 8 tablet

Timesheet - capturing your timesheets on either your smart phone or on your Windows 8 tablet

Approvals - approving different workflow documents on your tablet or through any HTML enabled email client

Introducing new native mobile device experiences

Innovations in Process Manufacturing

Potency Management

Basic Sequencing

Lot Inheritance (Lot Genealogy)

How Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 helps optimize talent in organizations

Core Human Resource Management:

Talent Management:

Ease planning and control of complex financial budgeting processes with Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2

Time involved in the process

Reacting to unforeseen events

Alignment within the organization:

Better business insight with Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2

Official Dynamics AX 2012 R2 Content (update) - Where is it, and how can you find out about updates?

Where can you find our content?

WebSearchAX

Installable Help updates and localizations

Inside Microsoft Dynamics AX (book)

What content can you find on the Community site?

What content can you find on PartnerSource and CustomerSource?

What content can you find on InformationSource?

How is the Help for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 different from the Help for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009?

Who is the documentation team?

What is the documentation team working on now?

What do we need from you?

Where can you hear from us?

The New Retail Reality – are you ready?

Processing U.S. Payroll with Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2

A sneak peek tour: 4 Business Benefits of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2