Dynamics AX is great, but when you start integrating it with all of the on-line offerings like Office 365, Power BI, SharePoint Online, and CRM, then it becomes even more powerful. If you are like me though and don’t want to sign up for all these additional on-line offerings if you like and pay the monthly hosting fee just for the demo environment, then don’t worry, there is an alternative for you because Microsoft allow you to provision a fully configured environment for free, that has all of this up and running and as a bonus you get your own demo exchange server that you can link to Dynamics AX to send out real e-mails though.

The only downside to this is that it has a fixed lifespan of 90 days after which you just need to re-provision a new instance. Although this may seem like a little bit of a hassle, when you compare it to what you would need to do in order to have this locally on your demo environment, it’s a small price to pay, and did I mention that it is FREE!

Now you can truly create killer demos.
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Normally I don’t promote to coding scripts within Dynamics AX because it is always perceived as something that a developer has to do. And for the power user, there are so many other ways to tinker with the system that getting your hands dirty with X++ is not necessary. One situation though that it’s sometimes just better to roll up your sleeves and write a little bit of X++ code is when it comes to updating masses of data. I’m not talking about updating 100 or so records because you can use Excel for that, but if you need to update 1,000’s or 10’s of thousands of records then Excel can be a little slow, and a script is so much faster.

Hopefully this worked example will demystify scripting a little and make you feel a little like a Whiz Kid.  Read More