Solutions Monkey : General

Inside Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 book RTM'ed

meysun — Thu, 21 May 2009 22:40:00 GMT

Inside Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 book RTM'ed

http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_press/archive/2009/05/20/rtm-d-today-inside-microsoft-dynamics-ax-2009.aspx

I wrote two chapters in Inside Dynamics AX 2009 book about Enterprise Portal and Role Centers. I also contributed to the Architecture Chapter and upgrade. Thanks to the entire EP team who implemented these great features and contributed in many ways to the content of these chapters. These chapters have wealth of info for developers and I would recommend strongly for EP / Role Center developers :) :) .

EMEA AX support team's blog

meysun — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:17:00 GMT

EMEA AX support team's blog http://blogs.msdn.com/emeadaxsupport/ has many useful EP deployment related posts.

Great job team!!!

Follow me on twitter

meysun — Fri, 01 May 2009 08:23:00 GMT

It's interesting to see the dynamics folks on twitter. You can follow me at http://www.twitter.com/meysun
I will try to tweet at least once a day

Convergence 2008 - Copenhagen

meysun — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:08:00 GMT

I will be presenting Enterprise Portal and Role Centers in EMEA Convergence.

Code	Title	Date/Time	Room
AX11	Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 Enterprise Portal and Role Centers	11/20/2008 2:00PM-3:00PM	Hall A1

Attend this deep-dive session on the Enterprise portal and the new 30+ Role Centers for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009. See how to build and customize enterprise portal pages and Role Centers to add new functionality and KPI metrics to help improve your user's productivity. Also hear from a partner on their perspective on Role Centers and how it benefits their customers.

Also I am conducting two round tables one with Partners and another one with Customers.

Building Web Applications in Enterprise Portal
SharePoint is one of the fastest growing server products from Microsoft. Enterprise Portal built on SharePoint and ASP.net brings business systems, collaboration and business intelligence together to provide access to information to employees from and reach out to customers , partners and prospects. With Web 2.0 type rich interactive user interface and capabilities coupled with great licensing options such as DCO, EP helps democratize access to business information and business intelligence to everyone in the org and improve their productivity and make right business decisions. Come and join this roundtable and help us understand your business requirements for web applications , collaboration/Search , development tools , user interface and influence Ax ‘6’ Enterprise Portal directions.

For Partners, Round Table P06 on 18-Nov from 16:30 to 18:00 at Expo Hall / Convergence Connect / Open Tables.
For Customers, Round Table M01 on 19-Nov from 14:45 to 16:00 at Hall B / Room 32

Also take a peek at the session catalog using the Primary Track "Microsoft Dynamics AX". There are 31 Ax sessions in addition to the keynotes and other events to choose from.

Looking forward to meet you all .

EP/Role Centers in WSS vs MOSS

meysun — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:09:00 GMT

Out of the Box EP has the same functionality in WSS and MOSS.
For Role Centers, we do light up two role centers with MOSS specific components.If you have MOSS, the CEO role center and the SalesMarketingExecutive Role Center will use MOSS KPI List and Filter instead of equivalent functionality provided in the WSS version of these rolw centers(by using SQL Reporting Services).

The end user benefit of using MOSS for these two role center is that
• In MOSS for these two role centers, you can change the filter at a page level ,where as in WSS you need to do it at the web part level.
• MOSS version uses KPI List to display the KPIs , so end user can easily personalize to add / change/modify KPIs. Whereas WSS uses SQL Report to display the same KPIs, so to change them you have to edit the report

The other advantage of using MOSS is that , you could use Excel Services or other BI components. But out of the box role centers does not use Excel services.Barring this the out of the box role centers behave the same way in WSS and MOSS.

Role Centers in Microsoft Dynamics Ax

meysun — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 09:48:00 GMT

Role Centers

Role Centers offer a Role Tailored User Experience in Microsoft Dynamics Ax 2009 that

provides at-a-glance business overview above the data to monitor business performance
provides summary view of each person’s work and present it in one, made-for-that user default page

Helps users plan and prioritize their work
Put work into consumable chunks
Notify users of work to keep the (work)flow going

provides "software made for me" experience

Users/businesses can personalize Home Pages
ISVs can add parts

Value Proposition

End Users

Reach every employee with pervasive BI in business process
Add value to every decision
Provides big picture and help keep the work flowing
Increase the impact and productivity of information workers
Analytics embedded in the Business application itself. One integrated tool for both analytics and business transaction
Easy to drill into the transaction details from the analytical information
Available in both Client and Portal

Developers

Leverages Meta data defined in business system to generate the cubes
Out of the box Cues and Role Centers simplifies the development
Easy to integrate other systems
Easy to customize the user interface using std Microsoft development tools

Administrators

Easy to assign users to Role Centers
Familiar SharePoint, SSRS, SSAS admin tools to manage user's permissions

Role Center Web Parts

Business Overview - for displaying KPIs and for time comparison
Dynamics Reports - for displaying charts and summary reports
Cues - for displaying work information like paper stacks pictorial representation
Quick Links - for shortcuts
Unified Worklist - for displaying alets, workflow actions and crm tasks
EP Web parts

Gantt View , List, any ASP.net control

WSS Web parts - for collaboration
MOSS Web parts - for BI

Filter, KPI List, Excel Web Access, RSS Feed etc

Any std SharePoint and/or ASP.net controls

Enterprise Portal in Microsoft Dynamics Ax 2009

meysun — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 09:31:00 GMT

What is Enterprise Portal?

Portal Platform for Microsoft Dynamics AX
Rich development tools and technology
Out-of-the-box self-service scenarios for customers, vendors, business partners and employees
Personalized, role-based portal

Enterprise Portal Architecture

Similarly to Desktop Ax 5.0 Portal builds on the rich Ax programming model and data binding
It exposes the rich Ax Metadata Binding
It uses the full flexibility of ASP.NET (code and markup)
It uses the dynamic customization and personalization of SharePoint
It unifies ASP.NET, SharePoint and Ax Metadata in the AOT

Value Proposition
End users

Modern web experience (responsive & interactive)
Utilizes AJAX for rich interactions
Rich data visualization through controls

Developers

Integrates with Visual Studio for design time experience
Rich toolset for developers

ASP.NET controls
EP Controls ( List / Form / Look up etc..)
SharePoint Web Parts
Third Party ASP.NET controls
User Controls
Custom Controls
ASP.NET pages

Provides full control of UI rendering
ASP.NET runtime and rich CLR language and libraries
Allows associations of web parts in one page

Administrators

End to End EP deployment completely integrated in Ax Setup
Prerequisites checks built-in
Auto Install WSS , Auto configure WSS , Auto create EP site
No manual steps required

What's new in EP?

New Asp.net based Framework
Web Modules are Sub Sites
One Site for All Ax companies similar to Client
Context Specific EP help
Reduced Configuration Steps ( For example, User Relation Configuration Optional for Role Centers ( Required for specific EP modules))
End to End Deployment part of Ax Setup
Consistent Navigation for Web Modules in Quick Launch
Lots of new application functionality

CRM in Sales Module
Expense Management
Purchase Requisition
Service Management
Compliance Center
Role Centers

Installing SQL Reporting Services and MOSS 2007 on the Same port ( default : 80)

meysun — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 01:17:00 GMT

If you have both MOSS 2007 ( Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) and Reporting Services ( not in SharePoint integrated mode) installed on the same IIS virtual server, then you have to make the below updates in web.config for them to work

1) In the Root web.config to comment out the below. Otherwise the reportserver will give sessionState partitionResolver Issue


2) In both Reportserver and ReportManager vdir web.config, the following should be added under appSettings. Otherwise you will get ReportViewer error messages
<remove key="ReportViewerMessages" />

This is because , by default MOSS uses /reports url for it’s report center and it’s the same virtual dir url for native SQL Reporting Services report manager as well.

Forms Based Authentication ( FBA) in WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007

meysun — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 23:47:00 GMT

1. Configure SharePoint Central Admin

Login to SharePoint Central Admin
Go to Application Management / Application Security / Authentication Providers and Change the Web Application to the one which needs to be configured for Forms Based Authentication
Click zone / default, change authentication type to forms and enter ActiveDirectoryMemebershipProvider under membership provider name ( for example , "ADMembershipProvider") and save this change

2.Update the web.config of SharePoint Central admin site

under <configuration> node

under <system.web> node

replace the connectionstring to the one matching your encvironment and replace"xxx" with domainname\username and "yyy" with password

3.Update the web.config of SharePoint Web application

Repeat step 2 for the web.config of the SharePoint webapplication to be configured for Forms Based Authentication
Change the authentication in web.cconfig to
<authentication mode="Forms">
<forms loginUrl="/_layouts/login.aspx"></forms>
</authentication>

For more details
http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/23b837d1-15d9-4621-aa0b-9ce3f1c7153e1033.mspx?mfr=true
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998360.aspx

Building Accessible Web Applications

meysun — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 08:58:00 GMT

Today I attended two hours training about Building Accessible Web Applications. This talk was given by Cynthia Shelly and George Young. This was well organized in such a way that it started with accessibility design for simple html pages and proceeded to dhtml and dynamic web pages and concluded with AJAX and async. processed pages. It was very interesting to see that simple schematic html with right role and name are the foundations for building accessible web applications. Even though I have gone through section 508 tools and resources before, it was a whole new experience today seeing a person first hand using screen reader software to access a website. It was very interesting to see how this tool linearize the content and provides a dialog listing all the links in the web and allows the user to navigate a table rows keeping the column context etc.I should thank Rob Haverty from our team for suggesting this training.

Also I met my old buddy Peter Thomson from my prior life at Microsoft and had a good chat with him after a long time .

Getting ASP.NET version used by IIS Web Site

meysun — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 01:29:00 GMT

It is easy to get the ASP.NET version installed at the machine level. But it took me some time to figure out ( with the help of others , of course) to get the ASP.NET version used by a given web site in IIS , since side by side is supported by .NET and admin would be able to pick the ASP.NET version from IIS Manager and change it at any time at a granular level.

Here is the code snippet & help I got

String sWebSite = “w3svc/1”
DirectoryEntry site = new DirectoryEntry("IIS://localhost/" + sWebSite + @"/Root");

                    PropertyValueCollection vals = site.Properties["ScriptMaps"];
                    foreach (string val in vals)
                    {
                        if (val.StartsWith(".aspx"))
                        {
                            string version = val.Substring(val.IndexOf("Framework") + 10, 9);
                            MessageBox.Show(String.Format("ASP.Net Version on virtual server is {0}", version));

}

}
The idea here is to use the System.DirectoryServices classes which will use IIS ADSI provider.
You need to read the ScriptMap property at your application path. For example if you wanna see the asp.net version for the default web site - read the ScriptMap at LM/W3SVC/1/ROOT/. The script map property is an array of strings. If the app supports asp.net one of those strings will be a mapping of the aspx file extension to the asp.net handler which will a the full path to a DLL. The path will be something like %windir%/Microsoft.NET/Framework/<asp.net ver>/aspnet_isapi.dll. You can get the version out of this string with some simple parsing.

Other approaches from scripts include

1) Running “cscript adsutil.vbs enum w3svc/filters” (without quotes) from command prompt should list the filters in IIS metabase. You need to change the current directory to c:\inetpub\adminscripts before running this command.

2) %windir%\microsoft.net\framework\v2.0.50902\ASPNET_REGIIS.EXE –lk

Decision Making

meysun — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 08:31:00 GMT

Received an Email about Frederick Brooks interview to Fortune
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/print/0,15935,1135298,00.html

What struck me most was his answer/quote from his ex-boss to the question , What advice would you give to one of those young managers?

"The problem is not to make the right decision; it's to make the decision right"

… from an executive-level point of view. As decisions bubble up they are first 80/10 decisions, then 70/30, then 60/40, and then they are 49/51 decisions. At that level the arguments on each side are pretty strong; going either way can be made to work, but it's very important to pick one and then go whole hog

Read the entire article at Fortune.com

1st MBS Innovation Sandbox Award Winners!

meysun — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 01:04:00 GMT

My name (along with Ramana Parimi) appeared in the internal 1st MBS Innovation Sandbox Award Winners list this week. This is the based on MBS-wide voting. So some one else has voted for my project other than me, which is cool :).

From our group we fielded 12 entries and two of them got the awards this time. I had the chance today to pitch our winning idea to the MBS Leadership team and there was excitement about the potential and impact it could have. Needless to say , there were some questions about some comments/points I made.

I would be very glad if this idea gets into the product one day. This work is based on some of the MSR and Windows Vista team's research and concepts.

For those of you who are wondering what this "cool" idea is, you may have to wait till it ships :). Don’t get mad then why I made this post, if I can’t divulge the details .

The point of this post is to highlight the fact that MBS encourages and rewards “innovations” through such division wide sandbox projects.

Live Software

meysun — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 07:44:00 GMT

Certainly “Live” is the latest buzz word and Microsoft responded to this renewed phenomenon in a big way. That is certainly going to fuel “Software-as-Service” concept further. One thing that I love about Microsoft is that it’s collective ability to recognize and respond to the new trends early enough and morph for future success. In that there is never a question about “Innovator’s dilemma”.

Nevertheless, does “Live” mean “dead” for every other software model?. I don’t think so.
There is a great analogy in Automobile industry. Five or ten years before there were dreams about cars that would run on water or electricity. I was certainly looking for a car that would fly me to my work (and avoid the traffic jam :) ). But today what has become real and tremendously successful are the hybrids and I certainly own one and proud of it.

So I think “Software-as-Service” is going to add value to the traditional on- premise
software, but certainly not going to replace it completely. It is going to be more effective and useful where the traditional software TCO is high and needs constant update and intelligence over wire to keep it effective, like my hybrid car which switches to electricity on a slow city traffic, but I love and need my “gas” engine when I am on the high way.

In “Web 2.0”, people most often think of AJAX, RSS as key themes, which is unfortunate. These are just user interface and application interfaces for web applications.The focus should be more on making web really the platform of platforms, which would allow people to develop, integrate, deploy and use applications that brings down the TCO and harness the collective community knowledge and enables distributed collaboration. Most of all it should make the applications simple and easy to use. “Simple” is the key to success.

Five Years in Microsoft

meysun — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 23:04:00 GMT

It has been a terrific ride so far in Microsoft. 5 years have gone by like a blink of an eye.
I started with the Demos team in 2000 in EPG. Built three versions of the content management system which was a huge success and crossed organizational boundaries and has become the de facto repository for internal content with millions of download and still growing at amazing speed. Worked with really cool and innovative people lead by strong organizational leaders and enjoyed every moment of it.

Then I built the portal management system for the sales groups which was well received initially but eventually disappeared after couple of years in production. But I had great satisfaction in building this as it served to provide some neat feature feedback to the product teams.

Also built the sales team profiling system and explorer which was a tremendous success with the sales force.

Then my org moved into the IT group and learned the organizational dynamics well over there. I went through some challenging phases but I believe came out with success.
While implementing web services for the internal customer relationship management system, faced with uphill challenges but eventually pulled out successfully and helped other sub teams as well to resolve similar issues to some extend. Great personal satisfaction on the accomplishment.

This year moved into MBS and enjoying every moment of it.

In the last 5 years ,
Worked in 3 groups
In 5 buildings
In 6 office rooms
For 3 managers
Managed 5 FTEs and
Nearly 40 vendors
Played 4 different roles
Rolled out 4 huge projects
Received 2 awards and more importantly learned a lot and still learning.

Hope the next 5 years will be even more fun and interesting.