Mobile apps for Dynamics 365 For Operations is available for download in Android

Posted on November 11, 2016 by Sandeep Chaudhury • Posted in AX 7, Blog posts • Tagged Android, AX 7, AX Mobile apps, Dynamics 365 For Operations, iOS, Mobile apps, New Dynamics AX, Workspaces • Leave a comment

Exciting times are here for Dynamics customers, prospects and enthusiasts !!

The mobile app for Dynamics 365 For Operations is now available for download and use in the Android platform.

You can download it from Google play store today. Just search with keyword Dynamics 365 and you should see the app listed.

After you have installed, login to your Dynamics 365 environment and provide your login credentials. That’s it.

Below are some quick screenshots that I took on my phone. I connected to one of my demo environments that has the Update 2 environment and I was able to see the one mobile app workspace I designed a few weeks ago, which I described in the post below.

https://sandeepchaudhury.wordpress.com/2016/09/30/sneak-peek-into-mobile-applications-framework-for-dynamics-axdynamics-365-enterprise-edition/

Obviously this was just a very crude attempt at creating a prototype mobile app to evaluate the new feature in Dynamics 365 and it worked great.

I could not connect it to the Update 3 environment, which is really the Dynamics 365 For Operations environment, as it is still being configured.I will work on creating a more usable and professional app/workspace in Dynamics 365 For Operations, and I will share more details once I have something ready. If you connect to an Update 3 environment, you will notice that there will already be several out of the workspaces/apps that are developed and published my Microsoft out of the box.

Regards,

Sandeep

How to create a new Workspace with no coding needed in New Dynamics AX(AX 7)

Posted on August 3, 2016 by Sandeep Chaudhury • Posted in Blog posts • Tagged AX 7, AX 7.0, Create workspace, Customize, Dynamics 365, New Dynamics AX, Personalize, Workspaces • 1 Comment

If you have worked enough on the New Dynamics AX , you must be well aware of the new Workspaces feature by now. The workspaces are basically an aggregation of several business tasks, insights, reporting and dashboards that a business user deals with on a typical work day. These workspaces comes in really handy for end users by providing everything they need to execute their daily tasks, all at one central location, so that they can become more productive and save time to focus on important things.

Workspaces probably are one of the most liked and talked about features of the New Dynamics AX among users, customers and prospects. Some of the examples of the workspaces are ” Financial Period Close”, “Employee Self Service“, “Manager Self Service“, “Project Management“, “Cost Administration” and more.

Standard Dynamics AX already provides several workspaces out-of-the-box for most of the operational areas and departments of your business(Shown in screenshot below), but there might be specific cases where you might want to create customized workspace of your own to meet your requirements. With the release of Update 1 for Dynamics AX in May 2016, you can now create and build your own workspaces without requiring a developer or any sort of coding. Let us see the steps involved in doing this.

Create a new Workspace in Dynamics AX:

On the main landing page of workspaces, right click anywhere on the blank area and click Personalize > Tile page container.

You will notice a new pop-up menu wit several options.
Click Add a workspace button.

Come back to the main landing page and notice that a new workspace with a default name “My workspace 1″ will be added. Right click on this new workspace and click Personalize > My workspace 1.

Let us now rename this workspace. Let’s say we are creating a new workspace for Fixed Assets Management, which is not available in standard AX yet.

The next step is to add the different components of this workspace to make it look complete. Let us first add a few live tiles. Navigate to the Fixes Assets Module and go the list pages which you want to add to the workspace. In this case I will add a few of the list pages. On the list page, click OPTIONS > Add to workspace and select the newly created workspace, and click Configure.

Continue the same for the remaining live tiles you want to add. At the end of adding all the tiles, your new workspace will look something like below.

Let us now add a few List items on this workspace. Navigate to the “Fixed Assets Transactions” form and click OPTIONS > Add to workspace button. Select the Presentation as List this time.

Repeat the same process to add all the lists you want on the workspace. At the end of it, your workspace will look something like below.

Next step would be to add the option of adding/removing Power BI tiles for dashboards and reports. Navigate into the new workspace and click Options > Personalize this form. On the Personalization pane, click the Add button and mark “Allow Power BI Control”.

At the end of adding the Power BI tiles option, your workspace should look something like below.

The last type of element that you typically add on a workspace is quick links to different menus and reports etc. You can do this by Personalizing the workspace and add the menu Presentation as Link this time.

That was all I had for this blog post. The workspaces framework in the New Dynamics AX will evolve for sure with lot of new exciting new possibilities in the upcoming releases. Stay tuned for more..

Regards,
Sandeep

Financial Period Closing in the New Dynamics AX(AX 7) – Get real time status, Be more productive, Close faster

Posted on June 23, 2016 by Sandeep Chaudhury • Posted in Blog posts, Dynamics AX 2012 • Tagged Accounting Team, AX 7, Financial Period Closing, Financials, Fiscal Period Closing, General Ledger, New Dynamics AX, Period Closing, Workspaces

Financial Period Close is probably one of the most important task that the Corporate Accounting team of your organization spends most time accomplishing. Accounting Managers of your organization spend tons of time in creating and assigning various tasks needed to close financial periods and always end up tracking status manually in MS Project, MS Excel or by other means. Today your Financial Period Close and status tracking probably looks something like below.

With this, you are not able to,

Know who is working on what task and when are going to complete it.
How much percentage the closing tasks are complete by operational area.
Who is having how much tasks remaining to be completed.
Know real time status of closing across all legal entities of the organization.

In today’s post, we will discuss the details of one of the workspaces of the New Dynamics AX, which is the Financial Period Close workspace and see how it can help you be more productive, track status in real time and close periods faster.

Workspaces in the New Dynamics AX are a new way of helping your users gain and do more in the ERP, all at one central location. The dedicated workspace for Financial Period Closing also intends to do the same and help your accounting team stay on top of their tasks for period close and get real time status updates at any time, so that they can act and escalate on delayed tasks.

Let us first see some of the insights into the some of the underlying setups before we discuss the workspace.

Configure Financial Period Closing:

Under General Ledger Module > Period Close , navigate to Financial Period Close configuration form.
Under the Closing roles tab, create period closing roles as per requirement of you organization. Note that these roles are specific to financial period closing and does not relate in anyways to AX Security roles. These are only required from the Financial Period Closing perspective.

Under the Resources tab, define/select the employees from your employee master, who needs to be involved in the Financial Period closing process. Also you can set “What they will see when they go to the Financial Period Close workspace”. Additionally you can assign one or more closing roles of each of these resources.

Under the Task areas, define the different areas of the tasks for financial period closing. These task areas will be ideally your different areas such as AR, AP, Bank, Fixed Assets, GL, Inventory etc.

Under the Calendars tab, configure and set the calendar for scheduling the tasks of Financial Period Closing. Note that these calendars are different than the organization and resource calendars.

Under Templates tab, create the List of tasks from scratch or from an exiting template. This is your master list of tasks that needs to be executed to complete the Financial Period Closing process. You can set up the Task description, which area it belongs to, when is it due (before the end date of the closing schedule).
Then assign each task to a Closing role (Which is linked to employees or resources) and select the Legal entities you want the tasks to be applicable for. Additionally, you can also setup dependencies between tasks and also set direct links to different forms of AX to complete the tasks.

Finally, create your financial period close schedule, select the start and end dates, the calendar applicable for it.

Now that we have gone though the setups and configurations, let us see how the Financial Period Closing workspace looks for an employee who is with certain closing roles and see how they can interact with the workspace in completing their daily tasks for period closing.

Arnie who plays the role of AR and AP clerk in the closing process, navigates to the Financial Period Closing workspace.

On this workspace, she gets to see filtered and actionable data for her task list in live tiles. She can she how many of her tasks are past due, how many tasks pending to be completed today, how many tasks of her blocked due to incomplete dependent tasks by others and all remaining tasks.

She also see the Task list that are assigned to her. For each of the tasks, she sees the due date, dependency and most importantly she can navigate to the destination form directly if needed by simply clicking on the task and take required action. For example she can click the Post Free text invoices task to directly launch the Free text invoices form.
Once she completes the task, she marks the task as Complete by marking the Completed checkbox.

Let us now see how the workspace looks like for an Accounting Manager, who is managing the status of the Financial Period Close process for multiple entities.

When Phyllis Harris, the Accounting Manager navigates to the workspace, she gets to see real time status updates in terms of % completion of the tasks by entity, task area, by person and more.

So clearly, the manager gets clean, real time updates on the status of the tasks for period close. They can see the status by entity or by area and person in terms of how much percentage is completed.

She can even drill down to each tasks under each area, person or entity to get more status updates or modify anything as needed.

That’s it for today’s post. Stay tuned !!!

Best,

Sandeep

Dynamics AX Tip: How to Personalize forms and workspaces in New Microsoft Dynamics AX (AX 7)

Posted on March 5, 2016 by Sandeep Chaudhury • Posted in Blog posts, Dynamics AX 2012 • Tagged AX 7, Customization, Dynamics AX Tip, New Dynamics AX, Personalize, Workspaces • Leave a comment

Hello Readers,

Until AX 2012 version, personalizing the forms and adding/removing data fields on them was a very important and widely used feature used by customers.

This quick post will help you understand how “Personalizing” looks in the new Dynamics AX. Let us take a look one by one.

When you are on a form or a navigation page in the new Dynamics AX, you can bring up your favorite Personalize options using the “Right click > Personalize:Form section” option. For example, I navigate to the Accounts Receivable > All Customers > Customer Details form/page > General fast tab and right click on it.

How to add a new data fields on a form/page:

Navigate to the form that you want to Personalize.
Right click > Personalize: Form section, i.e Personalize:Customer

Click + Add a Field to load the field list form.

Select the data fields you want to add and click Insert button.

Another way of adding a data field on a form is to select “Personalize this form” option after right click and Personalize.
Note that you can also launch the Personalization pane by navigating to Options > Personalize this form button.

Click the + button to load the data field list form. Select the data fields you want to add and click Insert button.

How to change properties of a data field:

Once you are on the Personalize form screen, select the “Arrow’ button to enable the property changes for various data fields on the form.

Hide: Mark this to Hide the selected data field on the form.

Include in Fast Tab Summary: Mark this to show the value of this data field on the Fast tab header summary of the fast tab, under which the data field is present.

Skip in Tab key sequence: Mark this to skip this data field on the tab key sequence.

Don’t edit: Mark this to block editing of this data field.

For example, let us mark the Include in fast tab summary for the Classification group field and see that it appears on the fast tab Summary.

How to rearrange or move around data fields on a form:

Once you are on the Personalize form, select the MOVE option on the Personalization pane and just drag and drop fields to move them around on the form as shown in screenshot below.

How to show/Hide data fields on a form:

On the Personalization pane, Select the Hide/Show button.
Now mark the data fields that you want to Hide/show.
If you had already made a field hidden, when you try to Hide/Show next time on the form, you can see those fields as marked for Hidden.
For example if I want to hide the ABC Code field hidden on the customer details form, I can mark that and upon refreshing the form, the field will be hidden.

How to add fields to show on the collapsed fast tab summary:

On the Personalization pane, Select the Summary button.
Now mark the data fields that you want to add to the fast tab Summary when collapsed.
For example, I have added the Language data field on the General fast tab.

How to change the display name of a data field:

On the AX form/page on a specific data field, right click and Personalize.
You can type in the name that you would like to see as the display label for the data field.
For example, I have renamed the Search name field to My Search Name on the Customer details form.

How to block editing of a data field:

On the form Personalization pane, click the Edit button.
Mark all the data fields that you would like to be shown as Non-editable fields.
For example, on the Customer details form, I want the Classification group field to be shown as non-editable.

How to Reset/Clear out all my Personalization:

If you decide to clear out all your form/page personalization, click on Manage > Clear button on the form Personalization Pane.
Reload the page.

How to add form data as a Tile onto a workspace:

You can also add a filtered data view, i.e. data on a particular form as either a Live Tile or as a list on any workspace you like.
For example, I can add the Timesheets for my review as a Live tile to the Manager Self-service workspace.