You may be familiar with the template capabilities that are available within the Released Products, but that isn’t the only place that you can create templates. You can turn any record within Dynamics AX into a public or personal template that you can use to pre-populate fields saving you setup time, and also ensuring that all of the miscellaneous fields are configures just how you like them.

It’s like having your own cookie cutter creator. Read More

If you are as OCD about tidy data as I am, then you probably hate data that does not quite match up with everything else in the database. Maybe it’s because you made a mistake in adding some data, or maybe you just want the data to look a little cleaner, we don’t judge. Luckily you don’t have to live with odd data within Dynamics AX, you can rename the records at any time and all of the related records will be renamed as well.

If it’s good enough for Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner then it’s good enough for your data. Read More

Pop-up notifications are great because it’s like Dynamics AX is sending you a personalized gift every time they show up. You could be getting a personalized alert that you have set up, or being invited to help with workflow task to streamline the business. You can tweak what happens when you click on the link though to fit your personality. If you are more of an cautious person, then you have the link take you to the alert details where you can contemplate what you want to do. If you are more of a impulsive person, then you can throw all caution to the wind and just go straight to the transaction from the link and get things done right away.

Either way I am sure you will still be excited to see what the notification is… Read More

Sometimes giving everyone access to every contact within the global address book is not necessary. Maybe you want to show people only contacts within their region, or legal entity, maybe you want to hide away inactive contacts from the default lists, or maybe you are just paranoid and don’t want to give people access to all the contacts in the system. Regardless of the reason, you can do this easily with a click of the switch within Dynamics AX through the Address Book Security feature.

Now you can keep your special client list away from prying eyes. Read More

Alerts are a great feature within Dynamics AX because they allow you to watch any information that you are interested in and then get alerts when the information is changed or updated. This is great for when you need status updates but are too busy (or lazy) to go into the list pages and look for yourself. But alerts are a double edged sword. If you are not careful you can end up spamming yourself. Having too much information being sent to you is just as bad as none at all. Luckily you can fine tune your alerts and notifications down from the shotgun approach to just the information that you are interested in.

It’s like having your very own truffle sniffing pig, except it’s not a pig and it sniffs out data, so really nothing like a truffle sniffing pig… Read More

Achievements are everywhere you look. You can get them for checking into your favorite restaurant through Foursquare, you can get them for writing code within Visual Studio, and you can definitely get them on any game that you play on your phone. So why not add them to your Dynamics AX forms so that you can add a little pizazz to day.

In the immortal words of Stan… I need to talk about your flair. Read More

You probably spend a lot of time trying to set up your pricing within Dynamics AX so that it is just right, and then the salespeople come along and just change it willey nilley as they are taking the sales orders. If a price change feels like a needle piercing your heart then don’t worry, you can turn off the ability for the users to be able to update the price that you have set up, or at the very least, turn on reason codes so that when a price is changed, the user has to say why they made the change.

At least now when the users break your heart and ignore the suggested pricing, you will know why and receive a little closure. Read More

The Product Configurator within Dynamics AX is very cool and is a great way to capture options during the sales and quoting process. You don’t have to go whole hog with it though and have it build BOM’s and Routes in order to have it help you during the sales cycle in quoting prices though. The Product Configurator has a built in Price Modeler feature that allows you to design a price build up based on your configuration attributes, and then calculate prices dynamically as you are placing your orders.

You will now be able to rest easy that all of the costs have been taken into account when you price out jobs. Read More

Lifecycle Services is the one-stop-shop for you as a partner, a prospective customer, and also a fully-fledged Dynamics AX user because it is chock full of tools that you can use to make your life so much easier. One of these tools is the Cloud Hosted Environment feature that will create a Dynamics AX environment for you that is hosted through the Azure services within a couple of minutes – give and take 30 for the machine to be deployed. Using this tool, you can deploy out pilot systems to prospects, create training environments that you can discard at any time, or just have your own dynamics AX instance running in the cloud rather than investing in a huge workstation. This is an incredibly useful tool.

I am sure you will have a better experience in the cloud than Han Solo did when he was deployed there. Read More

Dynamics AX comes pre-packaged with over 40 standard role centers for a lot of the normal user types that you would expect to see within an organization – CFO, Salesperson, AP Clerk, etc. Chances are though you probably have roles within your organization that don’t quite fit into those roles. You can either try to assign those users to one of the roles that most closely fits, or you can just create a new role centers especially for those users.

Say no to being generic. Read More