Blogs

Biggest Takeaways From Microsoft BizApp Summit 2019

By Alex Meyer
With Microsoft’s Business Application Summit 2019 wrapping up in Atlanta, I thought I would share my thoughts on the biggest takeaways from the conference in my opinion. New OneVersion Release Schedule Instead of doing 12 separate monthly updates, Microsoft is changing the F&O release schedule to include only 8 with the other months not having an update during those months. You can now pause up to 3 releases instead of 2 which means that you can theoretically get by with only updating twice a year if your update schedule requires that. Obviously Microsoft would like to keep you on the latest and greatest but not all industries allow for that. One ...
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Member Success Story: Serious Professionals with Serious AX Answers

By Delaney Freer
SSI SCHAEFER is the world-leading provider of products and systems for intra-company material handling and waste technology. With more than 70 operative subsidiaries and 10 global production facilities, SSI SCHAEFER develops innovative concepts and solutions for their customer’s industries. It’s during this process that SSI SCHAEFER shapes the future of intralogistics. AXUG never leaves its members in the dark Before Scott Tennant joined SSI Schaefer in 2015, he hadn’t experienced the community of AXUG in its entirety. During his time as a consultant with an AX Partner, he depended more on the network of consultants working with him in the office as ...
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Member Success Story: Simpson Technologies Finds Great Value in Reaching Out to Other Users in D365UG & AXUG to find answers.

By Delaney Freer
Two Offices, One ERP With over 100 years under their belt, Simpson Technologies is a fifth-generation family owned business specializing in the design and production of advanced process technologies and services for the global metal casting and chemical process industries. Simpson implemented Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0 in 2008 at their Swiss office with the goal of having the U.S. office up and running on the same ERP solution soon after. Julie McMillin, chief information officer, shares, “The need for a new ERP was more pressing in the Swiss office as they had recently completed a major acquisition. We ended up waiting to implement in the U.S. until ...
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Register before the Early Bird deadline for User Group Summit North America 2019 in Orlando!

By Gwen Toay
Big news – registration is open for User Group Summit North America. This one-of-a-kind event for learning, sharing and connecting, is happening again October 15-18, 2019! Registration is open – so register now and take advantage of our $400 early bird discount!   Summit is the premier annual conference for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations and Dynamics AX (AX2012, 2009) and Power Platform (Power BI, PowerApps, and Microsoft Flow) users, partners and Microsoft experts. Connect with the community and gain vital knowledge to maximize your software performance and further your job role, career and product investment.   There are ...
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Engage with the Microsoft Admin Center Research team!

By Aditi Singh
​Hi There!!  I’m the senior research lead at Microsoft focused on the Power Platform products: PowerApps, Flow, Power BI, and the admin centers for each (as well as the admin center for Dynamics 365). I’m reaching out because of your engagement with the CRMUG community, which makes me think you might be  interested in engaging with my amazing research team to help us improve these products. As a research team, we collaborate with users of these technologies to learn about their current experiences and get feedback on new design ideas that have not been included yet in the Power Platform products. This gives them a unique opportunity to see features well before ...
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Why Adding an Undo Button to Unpublished Objects is Not Easy in D365FO

By Alex Meyer
One question I’ve had throughout the releases of D365FO has been why there wasn’t an ‘Undo’ or ‘Remove’ for a security change made within the user interface. Before security changes go live into the system, they first go to a staging area called ‘Unpublished Objects’, on this screen there is currently a ‘Publish all’ and ‘Publish selection’ but there is no way to undo a change once it has been made. It is a feature that many users have asked about me about so I decided to look to see how feasible it was. The first thing to do was to figure out which form and SQL tables are being used for this functionality. After some digging I found the form was the ...
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How to Review & Update your D365UG/AXUG Privacy Settings & Discussion Signature

By Marghet Hager
Here on D365UG/AXUG, you can control what information shows to others on your D365UG/AXUG profile! Reviewing your D365UG/AXUG profile privacy settings periodically will allow you to understand what information of yours is viewable on our site and allow you to protect your information. To access your privacy settings, go to your D365UG/AXUG profile and click on MY SETTINGS>PRIVACY SETTINGS. What are my Privacy Setting options? You can set your information to four different settings: Public: This will allow anyone, even those who is not logged into D365UG/AXUG, to view this information Members Only: This will only allow people who have a D365UG/AXUG ...
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Things to Watch Out For When Developing D365FO Security Through the User Interface

By Alex Meyer
There are a couple questions I get/issues I see quite often around setting up security in the D365FO user interface so I figured I would make a post around things to watch out for. Security is still hierarchy based, and needs to be created in that way One of the things I’ve seen done quite often is a user trying to set up security where they assign just the access type to an object that a security layer should have (so assigning just Create like in the scenario below). If this is done, when the user tries to use this access later on they will get a permission error. The reason for this is that the user only has Create permission but not Read ...
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Extensible Data Security (XDS) Framework in D365FO

By Alex Meyer
The Extensible Data Security (XDS) framework is a feature in D365FO and AX 2012 that allows users to supplement role based security and allow access to tables to be restricted by a policy. This feature was an evolution of the record-level security that existed in previous versions of Dynamics AX. In simple terms, XDS is placing a WHERE (or ON) statement on any SQL SELECT, UPDATE, DELETE, or INSERT statement done to a table based on parameters from another related table. Data Security Policy Concepts Before we jump into how the functionality works we need to have an overview of some of the concepts and terms. In the below terms I’m going to use the example ...
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Moving an Overlayered Enum to an Extension in a Safe Manner in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations

By Cruz Margaix
You’ve got it. Microsoft finally resolved your extensibility request and that enum, which was preventing you from removing all your overlays, is now extensible. You’re bursting with enthusiasm. Plus extending an enum is so easy. Your Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (D365FO) solution will be in the extensions only world in a minute. I can imagine a broad smile on your face. I apologise for breaking that magical moment. But I must bring you back to reality and say that if you have a database which is already using the overlayered enum values, there are some precautions you will have to take to ensure you don’t end up with corrupted data after the data upgrade. ...
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Configuring Azure AD Group Security in D365FO

By Alex Meyer
In AX 2012 you had the ability to use Active Directory groups to help manage security within the application. The basic setup behind this was that you would: Create an AD group and put in the AX users you wanted to be controlled by that group Create the AD group within AX, that group would basically act as a user within the application Then create the users of that group as users within the application but assign them no security other than the System User role Configure the security for your AD group within AX, now anyone assigned to that group would automatically get assigned the roles assigned to that group Here is a great overview of the ...
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Automated Role Access Testing Using the SysTestSecurityAttribute in D365FO

By Alex Meyer
With the push in D365FO for automating everything from deployment to servicing to testing one of the questions I’ve heard numerous times is how do you perform/is it possible to perform automated role access testing? This comes into play for a number of reasons: With the quick releases of Microsoft D365FO I need a way to quickly ensure that my custom roles have the correct access even after updates I want to validate that the combination of roles have access to a specific table or field that allows a user to perform an action I want to validate that specific roles have access to custom objects I want to validate that the table permission framework is ...
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Table Permission Framework in D365FO

By Alex Meyer
In the past, I’ve written about the   Table Permission Framework functionality within D365FO   but recently I’ve had numerous examples of this causing D365FO users issues when setting up security. Because of this, I wanted to write about it again to explain how the feature works, how to troubleshoot security errors caused by the TPF, and how to remediate it. Table Permission Framework (TPF) Overview As a recap TPF is used to provide an extra layer of security to your high business impact data (credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc). It is an extra check that the security framework does that requires that the user has been granted explicit ...
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Interesting Behavior of Unpublished Objects in Dynamics 365 for Finance & Operations

By Alex Meyer
One thing I’ve been asked about numerous times and has caused confusion while using the user interface to set up security is some interesting behavior regarding objects showing up in the ‘Unpublished Objects’ area when no changes are made by the user. The Scenario A typical scenario is as follows: User goes to System Administration -> Security Configuration -> Privileges (and notices there is no objects within Unpublished Objects) Goes to a specific privilege -> Opens an object type -> Add a reference User makes no change and clicks ‘Cancel’ User notices there are now objects within Unpublished Objects and wonders (correctly) what has ...
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Setting Up Security in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations – Part III – Security Management

By Alex Meyer
In numerous other posts, I talk about the effect of where you create D365FO security (AOT vs user interface) has on how it is stored. In other posts, I talk about creating an application to help move your security created in the user interface to your AOT. I thought it might be a good idea to bring these ideas to together and summarize this topic and show what security management best practice looks like in D365FO. How is security data actually stored If you create/modify a role, duty, or privilege in a Visual Studio project, the security data is stored in XML format within the project folder under the AosService -> PackagesLocalDirectory folder and ...
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Tips and Tricks for using BYOD Database with D365 for Finance and Operations

By Mark Schurmann
We were an early adopter of D365 and for most of the time since going live I’ve been a vocal critic of the reporting capabilities of the application.  Microsoft initially pointed us to OData using Power BI or Excel. This has some limitations, most notably you can only retrieve data from a single legal entity.  Microsoft will next point you to a BYOD database solution.  When I initially looked at this as a solution, I continued to be frustrated primarily because the available data entities were still falling short of my needs.  This has improved over the past 6-9 months, and I am now able to use BYOD to get some answers.  This post is articulate what I’ve learned. ...
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Enabling third-party integration in D365FO using OData Services

By Nandita Nityanandam
Before the introduction of Dynamics 365, the earlier versions of Dynamics AX consisted of an Application Integration Framework that enabled seamless integration of AX with other applications. The feature – that allowed transfer of data in a SOAP format between applications – has since been deprecated from D365 Finance and Operations (D365FO). Instead, a new type of integration has been introduced in the form of OData Services. OData or Open Data is a standard protocol based on the Representational State Transfer (REST) for creating, reading, updating, deleting, and consuming data. By applying web technologies such as HTTP and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), ...
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All you Need to Know about Multithreading in AX2012

By Nandita Nityanandam
Multithreading is a feature that allows simultaneous execution of any two or more processes or threads by maxing out the CPU. If you try to carry out an extensive task without threading, it will take a long time and can cause the screen to go into a non-responsive state. Although the batch job functionality allows you to run the process in the background, it tends to have some limitations. For example, you cannot read an Excel file from a batch. However, with threading, the process runs in the background, allowing you to simultaneously carry out other AX activities – you can read Excel data and perform business logic in the background. Please note that since ...
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Once Upon a Time in the West…An Implementation Tale

By Jo Olson
For those of you following my blog series based off some of my favorite movies the title won’t come as a surprise. I am really hoping that by combining my experiences from the user perspective with the best film plots that it will be informative and entertaining. This month I wanted to circle back with you and give you an update on how our implementation has been going. We went live in April of this year in D365 from an outside legacy system and a handful of other small software programs. We kicked off our restart in January of 2018 and forced ourselves to go live on a compressed timeline of 12 weeks. For the record--I don’t recommend this to anyone! ...
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Moving D365FO security from user interface to AOT

By Alex Meyer
In a   previous post , I talked about how I created a tool to help generate D365FO AOT security files from the user interface security output. Now I wanted to show how you would use this tool to actually take changes made in the user interface and move them to your AOT. 1. Export user interface security changes from D365FO Go to System Administration -> Security Configuration -> Data tab -> Export This will export an XML file with all security customizations that have been done in the user interface. 2. Download the   D365FO Security Converter When you launch it the input file will be the exported file from the user interface. ...
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