The Campaigns feature within Dynamics AX is a great way to plan & manage marketing projects, but it is also a great way to market to your prospects and customers as well. Once you create your campaign, you can broadcast it through traditional methods like snail mail, or through e-mail blasts with the click of the button.
Getting the word out has never been so easy.
If you have linked Dynamics AX with your local version of Microsoft Outlook, then you have probably ran the synchronization that adds all of the appointments, tasks, and also the contacts to Outlook. But there is a more powerful option that allows you to synchronize not only from Dynamics AX and Outlook, but with Outlook back to Dynamics AX giving you an even more useful form of contact synchronization.
This is a great way to keep your contacts up to date, and also to populate Dynamics AX with all of your contact data without having to key in all of the people by hand, and also keep it up to date because it synchronizes both ways.
Remember, a contact does not become less useful if you share it with your friends.
Queries are like mining for gold, because everyone is searching for the motherload of data that is hidden within Dynamics AX, and once they find it, they mine it until it dries out and they have to start prospecting again. Also, the secret maps to that data are hidden away, usually on someone’s own personal hard drive, and are rarely shared with other prospectors. Office 365 and Power Query changes that because it allows you to share any of your queries with everyone within the organization, allowing everyone including the non-technical users that would never create a query.
No more claim jumping, there is enough data out there for everyone to mine.
If you want to publish out data to the users so that they can create their own reports, or run their own analysis, there is in a simple and secure way built into Dynamics AX. You can register your queries as Document Data Sources and then they automatically become available through the OData service within Dynamics AX. Additionally, all of the default security that you put in place around the data will be respected by the service because you are using Dynamics AX to create the query.
No more ODBC connections, or even worse… unsecured Access databases.
The document management function that allows you to create attachments that are based off a Word template. What makes this a super useful feature is that you can populate the document on the fly with data from the record that you are creating the attachment for.
Everyone has templates that they have squirreled away on their computer that they continually use for boilerplate responses. This takes it to the next level by creating all of these document for you based of the boilerplate documents… and they are not hidden on one persons computer any more.
The task recorder is great because it practically creates all of your user documentation for you. The only problem is that the format of the documentation that it created is a little bland. Don’t worry though, rather than reformat all of the documents that are created after the fact, you have the option to change the default template that is used when the documents are created.
An ounce of preparation is worth a pound of cure
If you have ever tried to create a PowerView report within Excel that is populated directly from an Analysis Services Cube, then you may have come across a small roadblock where PowerView refuses to work. All is not lost though, you can trick Power View into thinking that it is querying a real table by using PowerPivot to craft the query first.
The only downside to this is that we don’t have to use PowerQuery as much any more…
Every one knows that you can now edit your Dynamics AX projects directly in Microsoft Project, but the integration gets even cooler then that. If you have an existing project plan that you want to turn into a new project, then you can create it directly from Microsoft Project itself.
This is a super easy way to migrate all of your old projects over to Dynamics AX.
Attaching process specifications, and safety instructions to Bills Of Material, Jobs, or Process Specs a great feature, if they are not read by the workers when they are performing the jobs, then they don’t do anyone any good. Luckily, Dynamics AX has a feature within the Production module that allows you to specify that certain documents must be reviewed before starting jobs.
Now no-one can plead ignorance about new processes or procedures.
Dynamics AX Tip Of The Day 