Integration of Microsoft Dynamics AX with Microsoft Office Word

Microsoft Office , especially the excel, word and PowerPoint are the most popular office productivity  applications which everyone knows and works with today.

Imagine what if a Simple, scalable yet powerful ERP system integrates seamlessly with such  popular applications to exchange data so that users can spend more time on their favorite office applications and then easily push or pull data to or from the ERP without requiring any development effort.

As most of us know, with Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, these all come Out-of-the-box.

There has been a lot of great posts and discussions about the Office excel add-in functionality which is heavily used by most of the implementation teams up to some extent.

In today’s post, I wanted to uncover and discuss the integration of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 with Microsoft Office Word and demonstrate how these two applications share and exchange data effortlessly making the life of the end users a lot simpler and better.

Let us take an example where the sales manager of an organization has challenges in preparing different quotation/business proposal formats for different customers and still maintaining all the data inside the ERP system.

With Microsoft Dynamics AX  2012 and Microsoft Office, they can prepare as many number of proposal templates in MS word in any format they want for different customers/prospect, and then just upload them in the organization’s shared document library in the enterprise portal. AX 2012 can then sync those automatically within it to generate project proposals with data on to the templates without needing multiple development efforts. Let us now take look at the steps involved in accomplishing this in AX 2012.

Prepare the required project proposal templates and do the necessary data mapping within AX:

• Open a Microsoft Word document and click on the Dynamics AX tab.
• Connect to the Dynamics AX AOS server in the similar by which you connect the excel add in function.
• Now, once you have your document source types configured in AX, you would see the table and data fields in the Add fields pane. In this case, I have already done the necessary configuration.

Upload all your template documents on the shared document library of the enterprise:

• After you have prepared all your required proposal templates, you can upload them in the shared document library in the portal.
• This document can be shared, reviewed and managed as in normal SharePoint functionality.
• Once these are finalized and ready, AX has in-built functionality to sync with these.

Complete necessary setup in AX to automatically synchronize the documents into AX document types:

• AX 2012 now automatically synchronizes with the share point portal and gets the document templates to create new document types in AX.

Generate project proposals from proposal templates:

• In Dynamics AX, you can create and store proposal templates for various customers or price groups.
• Once you generate your new proposal either newly, or by copying from a template, the proposal is all set to be generated in the MS word formats which were created and designed outside AX, without needing any specific connection methodology. Thanks to the seamless integration of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and MS Office.

Generate proposal templates in your desired format with just click of a button:

• When you click on the Attachments button and create a new document, you will notice that the document template which we created and synced in AX appears automatically on the document handling options.

• Click New > Project Quotation Sample menu button. This will automatically attach the word document for the project proposal on to the proposal record and then generates and launches the document which the data automatically filled in from Dynamics AX which is ready for review and sending to Customers or prospects.

Powerful, Simple and Agile ! Microsoft Dynamics AX.