The Preview Panes within the Dynamics AX clients are great ways to browse view the data within the record that you have currently selected, and allow you to quickly scan through the information within your records. But not all information is shown on the preview page – hence the name. But you don’t have to resort to drilling into the records each time if you are always trying to find specific pieces of data – you can personalize the preview panes just like any other form in the system and add your key fields there.

It’s like having your own pair of X-Ray glasses… except you don’t look so goofy. Read More

The product thumbnails within Dynamics AX are great, except for only one thing. The developers seem to have taken the thumbnail size to the extreme, and they are a little too small to see in detail. There isn’t a simple flag in the system that allows you to resize the image to make it more readable, but if you want to live life on the edge, there is a tiny coding change that you can do that will solve the problem.

You don’t have to be stuck in an episode of Land Of The Giants any more. Read More

Questionnaires are a great way to gather information, and Dynamics AX 2012 has a great feature that allows you to create your own questionnaire formats for employees, vendors, and customers that can either be filled out through the self service applications, or delivered by an agent such as a CSR in conjunction with call lists, or to standardize HR questionnaires.

This is a great way to implement the Voight-Kampff Empathy Test.

Click here for the full post: Creating And Executing Questionnaires

Dynamics AX is truly a multi-lingual system, and switching the language that the client uses is just a matter of changing the an option.

It’s like having your very own Babel Fish in your ear. Read More

There are usually a lot of different configuration choices that you can make choose from when you are performing updates and postings within the Dynamics AX forms. But you probably only use one option on a daily basis. Rather than going in and changing the selection parameters every time you open up the form, Dynamics AX allows you to set the default values and from then on you will always have the right parameters in your form.

This is definitely a case of set it and forget it. Read More

You probably know already that you can create your own menu items and menus within Dynamics AX, but in addition to being able to update the navigation menus for the area pages, you can also update the Tools menu as well to add any utilities and forms that you may want users to access. This way the users don’t have to have access to AOT in order to open up those common hidden utilities.

If you really want to be clever, you can even add Tetris. Read More

Lifecycle Services is the backbone to your Dynamics AX implementation since it allows you to model all of your business processes, and also track any changes that you may be making as you are getting up and running. It also has an option to attach documents to your projects and business process models. But the documents are stored within Lifecycle Services as links, and not as uploaded documents – probably because Microsoft doesn’t want you filling up LCS with attachments. That’s not a problem though because if you use OneDrive as your document filing system, then you can easily link them into your LCS projects and everyone has access to them without a problem.

Gone are the days of transporting documents around in your head… Read More

If you have done any development and testing with workflows in Dynamics AX, then you are probably all too familiar with the on-demand Workflow Processor application that you can run at your leisure in order to see all of your workflows in action. It is great for testing because you don’t have to have a batch process running in the background. The only problem is that since it’s more of a development tool, accessing it requires you to search for it within the backwaters of the AOT every time that you want to run it. Thankfully with the R3 release, it has been promoted to the Tools menu, and is now just a few clicks away from you at any time.

It’s like when Starbuck saved Cy and they ended up working together to survive… Read More

Even if you are not requiring full blown EDI communications with your customers, it doesn’t mean that you can’t update your customers electronically with information like price lists, discounts, invoices etc. Dynamics AX has inbuilt features that allow you to create electronic mapping files, for these transactions and then send updated to the customers directly from the main forms. This allows you to configure the one or two EDI transactions that are required for you more demanding customers without having to invest In a complete EDI solution.

Now you can get into the 20^th century and throw away those old fashioned price lists that you’ve been sending to your customers. Read More

Twitter isn’t just for used for telling people what you had for lunch, it is also great tool, for keeping your customers updated, and also for communicating with others about any promotions or campaigns that you may be running. And you can link Dynamics AX directly to your Twitter account and have it post alerts and notices for you without even having to go to the twitter site.

Now everyone can tweet even if they don’t know what twitter is… Read More