Now the On-Prem system requirements are available : https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=55496

To get it running the minimum recommended requirements are:

Total Number of instances(VM/Machines) : 21

Total number of CPU cores : 104

Total Memory : 408 Gb

This minimum configuration will estimated be able to support 240-1200 users.

To sum it up: Go Cloud . Much smarter.

Microsoft ha liberado las especificaciones de hardware para la instalación de Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operantions edition.

A nivel de arquitectura tenemos el siguiente gráfico con un resumen general de la arquitectura y las máquinas necesarias para interactuar con LCS  y entre ellas.

A nivel de máquinas virtuales, nos muestra la siguiente configuración

En un entorno mínimo vamos a necesitar a modo de resumen:

• 16 VM
• 76 Core
• 272 GB de Ram

Visto los siguiente requerimiento de Hardware, si realmente necesitamos toda esta infrastructura, quizá el ir a un entorno cloud no sea tan caro como podía parecer en un principio

Podéis descargar la guía completa en el siguiente link

Microsoft just release the white paper about system requirement of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations and Enterprise edition In short Dynamics Ax 7 on premises.

You can download it from here
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=55496

Hey, y’all,

Sure, Nashville is known more for its music scene than its art scene, but we want to make sure you have something to remember D365UG/AXUG Summit Nashville, thus we’ve created a custom art piece just for our attendees. It’s less ephemeral than just rocking out for a week in Music City. And it’s something you’re sure to remember.

We commissioned vibrant, digital, artwork that’s inspired not by Dynamics (the software), but by the dynamic community of users and partners like YOU—the ones who bring the intention of the tool to life.

You’ll understand when you see it, but you’ve gotta be in Nashville this October for the full reveal. Until then we’ll be releasing one major art element a month through our emails, website and more. Stay tuned for the next art element coming in a couple weeks.

For now, we will tell you that it is:

• Bold: Like you and the work you contribute to across the board, our custom art doesn’t pull any punches. It’s bold and confident, like you are when rocking your skill-set in Dynamics.
• Current: Our artist Matt Mastrud, also known as Punchgut, isa preeminent, provocative artist who’s shaking up the art scene in America. And Dynamics’ just-now reporting ensures that you’re showing your bosses and colleagues you know what’s happening today—and what’s next.
• Fresh: Once you have a chance to meet your peers and pals who have their hands-on Dynamics, you’ll find new ways to get things done in your organization. After all, who could have imagined that an artist would be so inspired by a tool made by Microsoft? This conference gives you new ways to sells your skills and prove your value across your org. We promise.

In summary, we wanted to create a piece of art work that embodies who our members are, attendees and Dynamic Communities are and what the D365UG/AXUGSummit conference represents. When you boil it down, it’s all about you! Our attendees. Our attendees who attend D365UG/AXUGSummit to learn, network and to engage on all things Microsoft Dynamics. Our attendees who represent a truly vibrant community of subject matter experts who have this plethora of knowledge that is bubbling out of them which they want to share and learn more about.

At Dynamic Communities, we love and thrive off bringing this community together. Our goal is to make your conference experience one to remember and, like we said, we wanted to try to create a piece of art work that would embody all of this, and by golly, we think we nailed it!  

We know it seems silly or like some crazy marketing ploy, but it’s not. We’re frankly really inspired by how Dynamics provides a drum-beat to the heart of so many businesses, of all shapes and sizes. Even our artist agreed – he could feel the love as he created this piece.

Here’s what Punchgut had to say about the artwork:

“I looked at this illustration similar to the wide range of ingredients and style in Nashville BBQ. 2 quarts of color, couple gallons of pen ink and 3 shakes of secret special sauce. Since I am a big music fan, I HAD to include the wonderful Nashville music scene and the historic Nashville skyline. Looks like a great event!! I would gladly accept a "temporary adoption" from any team to join them in Nashville. Enjoy Tennessee!” 

Until then, we can’t wait to see you in Music City! If you’re not yet registered, you have a couple short weeks until Early Bird pricing ends. Don’t miss out on saving $400!

The combined May-June release for Dynamics AX 2012 R3 version is now available in LCS on the updates tile inside your R3 project. This update represents a typical collection of smaller functional improvements and technical fixes.  Bugs were fixed in all areas with enhancements found in Warehouse & Transportation, Accounts Receivable and Inventory Management. Please see the full list of hotfixes below to search for your specific issue newly included in this release. This release is a cumulative package including all other fixes released in prior updates. This release is intended to give visibility into fixes recently shipped for R3, including some features and design changes that are newly released in this month.

Here are a few details related to this release:

• Primary Build: 6.3.5000.5086
• Number of Application hotfixes:241
• Number of Binary hotfixes: 34

Details of the install process can be found here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh538446.aspx#PackageR3

What is included in this months release?

Design Change Requests, Feature Requests & RegFs

Fixes Released

This article discusses the differences between corporate performance management (CPM) and business intelligence (BI) solutions in the cloud technology era.

I have written a lot about corporate performance management (CPM) solutions. And I have also explored business intelligence (BI) tools quite a bit. You could easily argue that I seem to use the terminology interchangeably – and you wouldn’t be too far off, but there’s some method to this madness. CPM and BI both inhabit the same marketplace of enterprise technology because they do the work of summarizing the health of an organization. Pulling information from disparate sources to analyze data and crunch numbers, these two product categories enable you to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. That said, there are differences, and while their end results might not appear mutually exclusive, there isn’t too much overlap. As we continue to see a migration to a new normal of cloud platforms for our enterprise technologies, it is helpful for you to understand the differences between CPM and BI, so you can deploy the right solutions to meet organizational objectives. This article will differentiate between CPM and BI tools, so you can continue to build a cloud technology roadmap with accuracy.

Let’s start with definitions. Gartner defines CPM as “an umbrella term that describes the methodologies, metrics, processes and systems used to monitor and manage the business performance of an enterprise.” On the other hand, BI is defined as “the technology used to gather and analyze data relevant to an enterprise in order to improve business decision making.” That might sound somewhat similar to you on paper. While both terms are defined in some variety throughout the internet, maybe you can see why I might use the terms interchangeably and/or loosely. But let’s refine our understanding of the two as they differ a little further.

As a concept and a term, BI has been around longer – 1989 to be precise, while CPM came about in the early 1990s. The father of BI as he’s known, Howard Dresner, came up with the term in a move away from older decision support applications. His objective was to pinpoint in one term the practices and methodologies of making more informed business decisions via fact-based company data. Moreover, BI tasks are primarily focused on visualizations, as in dashboards of charts, scorecards, and graphs. BI isn’t just company data trends, illustrated, but also invites drill-down into numbers behind the visuals. BI can also mean big data analytics, with web site traffic and visitor behavior as one example. Generally speaking, BI is produced for the whole organization in terms of who is the audience, whereas CPM tends to zoom in on a smaller group of professionals.

To continue learning about the differences between CPM and BI in the cloud era, click here.

About Solver

Solver is the leading provider of complete BI solutions for today’s mid-market enterprise and the company has been at the forefront of BI technology for over a decade. Solver’s BI360 solution is a powerful, Microsoft-based suite of modules for reporting, budgeting, dashboards, and data warehousing with extensive, pre-built integrations to Microsoft Dynamics AX, GP, NAV, SL. www.solverglobal.com

The post CPM vs Business Intelligence in the Cloud Era appeared first on goERPcloud.

This blog assists those who are struggling to set up some aspect of printing in D365 for Operations due to the limited documentation in circulation.

We had 2 scenarios at our customer site:

–        Barcode printing.

–        FollowMe printing.

Barcode printing

Barcode printing is not meant to be complex, but when printing to screen or printer, it did not work.  The reason was that the machine which generated the report must have the barcode font installed. When printing to screen a webpage is generated that contains the following content.

This content is pointing to font type ‘BC UPC HD Wide’ If this is not installed, it prints .7E6DK4/;;<@@=.  instead of a nice-looking barcode.  This is additionally confusing for developers when it is installed on their local Dev VM and subsequently doesn’t work at the customer site.

Printing on device

When that is resolved, the next issue is physical printing.  Printing is using a device that is in your network.  Dynamics 365 in the cloud is not aware where that printer may be. To address this gap Microsoft introduced the Document Routing Agent: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/operations/dev-itpro/analytics/print-documents

In my opinion the only the suitable configuration is to run the agent as a Windows service as this does not bother the user. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/operations/dev-itpro/analytics/run-document-routing-agent-as-windows-service

When creating this service, there are some pitfalls:

• Be sure to have a legal PDF viewer installed on that server.
• After installation

o   First change the service account of the service to the admin user of the Dynamics 365 environment (by default it is local host).  If this is not done correctly, it will create several errors in the Error Log.

o   You can only get printers in Dynamics 365 by installing them on the server where the Document Routing agent is running.  (Also the printer drivers needs to installed on the server.) Start application in the Internet browser and open the network printers form. All configured printers will appear. The printers are now also available for all other users. This includes adding new printers in the future.

FollowMe printing

Follow me printing is where the logic determining the printer is based on the file owner.  For instance, a user prints to a pool and the document is physically printed when an identification (ex. A keycard), is scanned at a printer.

The document that is sent to the routing agent is a pdf file that is stored in a file share on the routing agent. The file owner of this pdf is the service account of the service. In the previous topic, we recommended setting that to the admin users.  As the file owner is now not the person who printed the document, the result will be that the document is not physically printed based on the user making the print request.

Work around?

The current work around is that the user must save to pdf, open the document and print from the pdf viewer.  This is not a sustainable solution, for instance when printing bulk documents.

Hopefully Microsoft will solve this shortly.

The post Dynamics 365 LCS Tricks – Barcodes, Document Routing, FollowMe printing appeared first on Kaya Consulting.

In this post we will have a quick look at the Expenses workspace on the Dynamics 365 for Operations Mobile application.

I used a really small mobile to do my screen capture and some of the UI doesn’t look great.

First screen will give you an option to Capture a receipt (image) or go straight into the Quick expense entry form.

Allows you to take a picture or choose from your device.

Next screen will allow you select a category.

Next screen is the actual form where you enter the details. Errors and warnings show at the top.

It is early stages and I am sure there is more features to come.

In this blog post, I briefly recapitulate how to throw and catch exceptions in X++ and introduce a new way of handling CLR exceptions in AX 7.

X++ exceptions

When you want to throw an exception in X++, you typically do it by something like this:

throw error("It's broken!");

It’s a functional equivalent of adding a message to infolog and throwing Exception::Error.

infolog.add(Exception::Error,"It's broken");throw Exception::Error; // number 3

As you see, an exception in X++ is (or used to be, as I’ll discuss later) just a number, because enums are backed by integer values. It doesn’t come with any extra information, not even the message. Adding messages to infolog is a separate process; you can add error messages to infolog without throwing any exceptions and throwing exceptions without adding anything to infolog.

When you want to catch an exception, you’ll use a catch clause with the right value of Exception enum (usually Exception::Error) or you’ll handle all exceptions (by a catch clause without any type).

The following statement will work for all errors, but you don’t get any information about what error it was:

catch (Exception::Error){… }

Just knowing that there is an error doesn’t allow you to react differently to different errors, therefore you’ll rarely see code in AX trying to recover from a particular error.

CLR exceptions (in general)

It’s very different in Common Language Runtime (CLR). Exceptions there are objects (instances of classes extending System.Exception) and they contain a lot of information that can help you to identify what happened. For example, you can look at the type of exception (e.g. ArgumentNullException or FileNotFoundException) and react accordingly. The error message is a part of the object too, not just lying somewhere in infolog. The exception also comes with the stack trace, so you can easily see where it was thrown from.

Because the classes form a hierarchy, you can also handle exceptions in a hierarchic way. This is what you can write in C#:

catch(FileNotFoundException ex){… }catch(Exception ex){… }

The system will try catch clauses one by one, going from the top down, and will use the first compatible clause it finds. If a FileNotFoundException is thrown, the first block will be used, but all other exceptions will go to the latter one, because they’re not FileNotFoundException but they’re all compatible with System.Exception, which its their common base class.

Exception::CLRError

Sometimes you have to handle CLR exception in X++, because you can use .NET libraries from X++ and such libraries can throw their usual (CLR) exceptions. The traditional approach is catching Exception::CLRError, getting the exception object from CLRInterop::getLastException() and extracting information from it. It’s further complicated by the fact that the actual error is usually wrapped in TargetInvocationException.

This is how you can handle FileNotFoundException in X++:

try{
    System.IO.File::ReadAllText('c:\\nothing.here');}
catch (Exception::CLRError){
    System.Exception wrapperEx = CLRInterop::getLastException() as System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException;if(wrapperEx){if(wrapperEx.InnerException is System.IO.FileNotFoundException){
            warning(wrapperEx.InnerException.Message);}}}

It works, but it’s cumbersome and hard to understand.

Catch with object reference

Fortunately AX 7 offers a new, much better option. Let me start by refactoring the previous example:

System.IO.FileNotFoundException fileNotFoundEx; try{
    System.IO.File::ReadAllText('c:\\nothing.here');}
catch (fileNotFoundEx){
    warning(fileNotFoundEx.Message);}

This is obviously much shorter and easier to follow. In catch, I don’t have to use only values of the Exception enum anymore, I can also use exception objects. The system checks the type, selects the right catch clause and passes the exception object there. It’s almost the same as in C#, except of the fact that you can’t define the exception type directly in the catch condition; you have to declare a variable in an outer scope.

As in C#, you may have several catch clauses for different types of exceptions and benefit from the hierarchical nature of exception types. For example, the following snippet handles two types of exceptions in a special way and all remaining exceptions go to the last catch clause.

System.Exception                generalEx;
System.FieldAccessException     accessEx;
System.IO.FileNotFoundException fileNotFoundEx; try{…
}
catch (accessEx){
    warning("Field access");}
catch (fileNotFoundEx){
    warning("File not found");}
catch (generalEx){
    warning(ex.Message);}

ErrorException

All right, so X++ errors can be caught with catch (Exception::Error) and CLR exceptions by their particular type, but isn’t all code now executed by CLR? Does it mean that X++ exceptions use a different mechanism than CLR exceptions, or they’re just normal CLR exceptions under the hood?

You can find the answer in debugger, which reveals that “native” AX exceptions are indeed implemented as CLR exceptions:

The object (as you can see in debugger) has all usual properties, such as Message, Source, StackTrace and so on. Note that you can see the same behavior in AX 2012 if you debug CIL generated from X++.

Now what if you want to access the properties when handling an exception, e.g. to include the stack trace in a log? If you catch Exception::Error, you won’t get any details, but what if you try to catch ErrorException in the same way as any other CLR exception? If you think it should be possible, you’re right – the following piece of code successfully catches an X++ exception and shows how you can access its properties.

Microsoft.Dynamics.Ax.Xpp.ErrorException xppEx; try{throw error("It's broken!");}
catch (xppEx){
    this.log(xppEx.StackTrace);}

The problem that all X++ errors have the same exception type (ErrorException) is still there, therefore handling different errors in different ways is still hard, but you can now easily find which message belongs to the exception (without digging into infolog), where it was thrown from and so on.

By the way, I also wondered what would happen if I tried to catch both Exception::Error and ErrorException, because they’re internally the same thing.

Microsoft.Dynamics.Ax.Xpp.ErrorException xppEx; try{throw Exception::Error;}
catch (Exception::Error){
    info("Exception::Error");}
catch (xppEx){
    info("ErrorException");}

Such code compiles without any problem and the resulting CIL will actually contains two catch clauses for the same exception type (ErrorException). It means that the top one always wins, regardless whether it’s catch (Exception::Error) or catch (xppEx). Using both for the same try statement makes little sense, but at least we now know that nothing catastrophic happens if somebody does it by mistake.

Conclusion

The native implementation of exceptions in X++ is very limited in comparison to CLR exceptions. The inability to distinguish between different kinds of errors makes meaningful recovery from errors virtually impossible and the lack of associated information (such as the message) makes even mere logging quite cumbersome. This doesn’t apply to CLR exceptions and their handling in X++ is even easier than before, thanks to the new ability of catch clauses. The fact that we can use this approach for X++ exception as well means that we can easily work around one of the limitations and access properties such as message and stack trace even for them.

It seems that we’re just a small step from being able to work with exceptions in X++ in the same way as in .NET. If we could throw exception objects (e.g. throw new MissingRecordException()), we would be able catch this particular type of exception and implement more robust logic for recovery from errors.

It would also help if X++ was extended to support declaration of the exception type directly in catch (e.g. catch (MissingRecordException ex)).

Adjusting the Pick Location after work is created using Advanced Warehouse Management in AX 2012 R3

When items are on an outbound order such as a sales order, inventory must be reserved to fill the orders. This reservation process will follow the rules of your reservation hierarchy. At the very least, reservation hierarchies are based on three variables: site, warehouse and inventory status. The site and warehouse tells the user where the inventory is and the inventory status reflects only available or good inventory. Any inventory that is blocked or has a status of bad or no good such as damaged items can’t be reserved. The system will reserve items based on the order specified in the reservation hierarchy until it reaches the location attribute.

To find the reservation hierarchies, navigate to warehouse management > setup > inventory > reservation hierarchy.

With WMS, when sales orders are released to the warehouse for picking and packing, the items on the sales orders are reserved based on the reservation hierarchy as discussed above and work is created. The work is then processed by the warehouse using the mobile device.

Now work may not always be processed in the order in which they are created, which could lead to changing the designated picking location from what is indicated on the work. When needing to change the picking location, you can use the override function in the mobile device menu. To do this, enter the work id as you normally would and then when prompted to the pick location, select override from the menu options below. The mobile device will prompt you to enter a reason and then ask for the new pick location. However, the new picking location may be reserved by another work in which the following error message will appear.

If you know you have sufficient inventory in the warehouse, then you’ll need to check in AX, in the on-hand inventory. There are a few different ways to check on-hand inventory. Here are a few ways.

• Navigate to Product Information Management > Common > released products
• Navigate to Inventory Management > Inquiries > on-hand
• Navigate to Warehouse Management > Common > Work > all work; open the work order you’re trying to process, right click on the item number and click view details

Since we’re working with WMS and chances are you’re already in the warehouse management module, we’ll use the 3^rd option above, from the work order.

The example we’ll use is item M9204 from the AX 2012 R3 Contoso demo environment. We have two sales orders, one for 100ea and one for 80ea. The work created for these sales orders are USMF-001105 and USMF-001106 as you can see below.

As described above, open the work order and right click on the item number. Then click view details. This will take you to the released products form for this item where you can view the on hand inventory for this item.

Click on the Manage inventory tab in the action pane above and then click on-hand inventory.

As you can see, we have 180ea total in physical inventory and all 180 has been reserved.

Notice the first line is a summary line of all physical reserved inventory for this item. Highlight this first line and click Transactions at the top.

Filter on “reserved physical” in the issue column. This will show you all reserved inventory by order and the location the system reserved at. Here you can see the first work order is reserving inventory in both location 002 and BULK-010 for a total of 100ea, and the second work order is reserving inventory in location BULK-010.

In our example, we tried to process work id USMF-001105. This work is for 100ea but the system split the pick between two locations, for two picks of 80ea and 20ea.

In the mobile device, we tried to override the pick location to pick all 100 from one location, location BULK-010 and received the error message of “unable to reserve inventory for work”.

To pick the 100ea in location BULK-010, we need to remove the reservation on the inventory in second work order, so all inventory in location BULK-010 is available for the override process to take place.

First we need to cancel the second work order and then cancel the reservation. This can be processed one of two ways.

Cancel the work order, then cancel the load on the sales order.

• Navigate to the work by Warehouse management > Common > Work > all work
• Select the work order
• Click “cancel work” in the action pane above

• Navigate to the sales order by right click > view details on the order number in the all work list page (or you can navigate to the all sales orders list page in either the accounts receivable or sales and marketing modules).
• Expand “line details” at the bottom
• Click on the loads tab
• Right click > view details on the load number
• Click delete
• Process the first work order for 100ea using the override option on the mobile device
• Re-release the second order to the warehouse. If your sales orders are setup for automatic reservation, then you can just re-release to the warehouse on the second sales order. You can look at the header on the sales order to confirm the reservation setting. If it’s not set to automatic, then you will need to re-reserve the inventory before releasing to the warehouse.
• process the new work for the second order

Cancel the work line, then cancel the work order.

If you cancel the work line before canceling the work order, then the item and quantity will be canceled on the load. If all items on the load are canceled using this process, then the entire load will be canceled.

• Navigate to the work by Warehouse management > Common > Work > all work.
• Double click / edit the work order.
• Select the pick line to be canceled and click “cancel work line” in the Lines section of the work order. If canceling multiple picks, repeat this step for each pick on the work order.
• Cancel the quantity. This is the action that will update the load so you don’t have to navigate to another screen. The quantity is already populated with the total quantity on this work line. Click OK to cancel the work line and update the load.
• Notice the work line status changed to canceled. Now cancel the work order.
• Process the first work order for 100ea using the override option on the mobile device.
• Re-release to the warehouse on the second sales order. If your sales orders are setup for automatic reservation, then you can just re-release to the warehouse on the second sales order. You can look at the header on the sales order to confirm the reservation setting. If it’s not set to automatic, then you will need to re-reserve the inventory before releasing to the warehouse.
• Process the new work for the second order.

This article was written by Tracey Schebera, Consultant for Tridea Partners. Tridea is a leading Microsoft Dynamics provider.

Last week, MSDynamicsworld.com held their first free, virtual conference for the Dynamics community in quite a few years.  Dubbed, 2017 Innovation Expo, thousands of Dynamics gurus and prospective users explored new vendor technologies, collaborated with peers, and learned new exciting ways to create value from their Dynamics technology.

During the online conference, Data Masons shared our EDI Made Simple for Dynamics solutions through a series of webinars. While you may have missed the live broadcasts, the recorded webinars are now available for on-demand viewing. Check them out below!