Microsoft Dynamics 365

Waarom niets doen meer kost dan upgraden

Wat is Power Platform voor Microsoft Dynamics 365?

Hoe Microsoft jouw data in de cloud beveiligt

Redenen om te upgraden van Dynamics AX naar Dynamics 365 SCM

Redenen om te upgraden van Dynamics AX naar Dynamics 365 Finance

7 redenen voor een upgrade van Dynamics AX naar Dynamics 365 F&O

Size does matter (or not?)

It is a general issue with D365FO development on those development VMs (virtual machines) when it is not working as planned, in the end we throw it away and start over. In the next blog I will explain some tricks to solve issues on the disk space. Look at the next example, we use a disk of 32GB and need 20 of them so we have 640 GB of disk space.

Of course, check the prices: Pricing – Managed Disks | Microsoft Azure.

Besides the disk size I also use DS13 V2, so I can upgrade to Managed Disks: Performance tuning development VM (Virtual Machine) – Kaya Consulting (kaya-consulting.com)

Why not 10 * 64 GB or 5 * 128 GB? It is all about IOPS!

Later, in Azure it will look like below.

When we look at the VM with Disk Management we see a striped disk that has partitions for database and ‘AOT (Application Object Tree) drive.’

So far so good, but the developer needs a good database and when restoring, scenarios like the next picture may occur.

We are stuck, no space on the G drive. And plenty of space on those other drives. So, let us adept, we start with shrinking the other disks. NOTE: K drive needs 15 GB free space for installations started from LCS (Life Cycle Services).

After shrinking we add the created free space to the G Drive.

• In case you still run into disk space issues, use the next SQL script to compress the database:

EXECUTE sp_msForEachTable ‘ Print ”?”;SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON ;IF EXISTS (Select * from sys.indexes Where object_id = object_id(”?”) And type=6) ALTER INDEX ALL ON ? REBUILD ELSE ALTER INDEX ALL ON ? REBUILD WITH (data_compression=PAGE,FILLFACTOR=99)’

• Another trick is dropping the retail database, it is in any installation package, the script name is DropAllRetailChannelDbObjects.
• Set the database recovery model to simple will reduce the database log disk size.
• Check the SQL report “Disk Usage by Top Tables.”
• Add an additional disk:
  • Attach a managed data disk to a Windows VM – Azure – Azure Virtual Machines | Microsoft Docs

Of Course, I would love to give you a golden rule for size of the bacpac file in relation to the needed disk space. I can give you a refence a 9 Gb Bacpac file results in a 90 Gb Database MDF file. So  Bacpac file size multiply by 10. It is still a guesstimate 🙁

Intro to Configurable Business Documents – Part 1 of 3

How do we generate configurable business documents for our customers in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations? You will find only very basic documentation on Microsoft Docs, so you will need to watch quite some available webinars on the internet to get a bit of an idea.

The big advantage of configurable business documents lies clearly in the word “configurable”. Configurable business documents are not part of the software anymore, they are not a matter of development but rather of setup. Creating and updating business documents is no longer part of the software development and release process. Adding or removing fields, adjusting the document layout and formatting, changing the document data sources and designs, it can all be done at any time directly from within the D365FO production environment itself. So configurable business documents provide much more flexibility than SSRS reports and there is no more need for deployments!

The business document management audience targeted by Microsoft are business users. No knowledge of the Electronic Reporting (ER) framework is supposed to be required and as usual it is all very simple and fast… OK, back to reality! The out-of-the-box business documents hardly ever meet the customer’s requirements and the layouts usually need to be completely turned upside down. Because generating configurable business documents proves to be a quite complex and therefore time-consuming process the business user will soon hand it over to a functional consultant, who in turn will seek help from a developer because a deep understanding of the data structure is needed. Apart from that, the user experience is not yet very friendly, the design is difficult, troubleshooting is not easy and some of the features are still unstable resulting in errors like “Something went wrong, but we were able to recover your session”. Let us say there is room for improvement…

In this small series of blogs I will share my first experience with configurable business documents on a customer project and summarize and briefly explain the necessary steps to be taken. But before doing so I will try to answer the following question.

What are Configurable Business Documents?

Configurable business documents are built on top of the ER framework and basically consist of ER configurations plus templates. The following three types of reporting configurations are always involved, working closely together:

Data Model

This defines the logical data tree structure with the necessary data fields as required by the business domain for which it will be used. Good examples are the Order model, Waybill model, Invoice model and Reminder model.

Data Model Mapping

This connects the data model elements with its data sources in database, classes, calculated fields, etcetera, from where the data will come at runtime.

Format

This defines the output data tree structure for the template and its mapping to the data model. It includes templates in Excel and Word.

The data model is in fact in the center, with on the one side the mapping with the data sources and on the other side the output mapping with the format template. The flow looks like this:

At execution time the configurable business documents still use the known Print Management functionality and the SSRS execution pipeline. But instead of generating an SSRS report and sending it to an SSRS print destination, the configurable business documents flow as depicted above is executed, generating an output document and sending it to one or more ER destinations.
The main purpose of configurable business documents is to replace the SSRS reports and to make customization of business documents like order confirmations, invoices, collection letters, etcetera much easier and less costly.

Required setup

Before we can make our hands dirty, we must first do some minimal configuration activities:
• Make sure that in the Feature Management workspace the following features are enabled:
o Business document management.
o Convert Electronic Reporting outbound documents from Microsoft Office formats to PDF.
• In the Electronic Reporting workspace, we create a configuration provider for our customer besides the one for Microsoft. After this we set it active and define a configuration repository for the newly created configuration provider via the Repositories link on the new tile (see picture below).

My favorite type of repository used to be LCS, because it worked fine for me to do maintenance and distribution to other environments. But recently Microsoft decided to deprecate LCS as an ER configuration storage type and now recommends us to use the Global repository instead. Via the below link in the ER workspace a special Regulatory Configuration Services environment (RCS, nothing more than a stripped down D365FO environment) can be provisioned in which the customer’s ER configurations will have to be maintained.

This forces us to move all existing business document configurations to this new provisioned environment. A migration option like for example importing these configurations directly from LCS does not exist. Another thing is that the new environment does not contain any D365FO metadata. So, in addition to the business document configurations also metadata configurations need to be created and moved over to the new environment. Hopefully, Microsoft will come up soon with a solution to support this imposed migration to RCS.
• Setup the following ER parameters:
o Set Enable design mode to Yes, otherwise we cannot do anything.
o Define a File document type and assign it on the Attachments tab.

After this has been done, we should be ready to go!

In the next blog of this series you will learn where to start and how to derive configurations, we discuss repositories and take a look at the format designer. Till next time!

Please read the other related articles on this link https://kaya-consulting.com/category/Business-Documents/

Do you want to join a major online retailer?

Connecting to online platforms such as bol.com, Amazon, Zalando or Thuisbezorgd seems very easy for many entrepreneurs and therefore very interesting. But what does this do to the competitive position of your organization? And what are other challenges you can face?

Threat or opportunity?

The large online platforms saw profits grow enormously due to the corona crisis. We also saw an increase in demand from our customers for links with such platforms. Many organizations will think “if you can’t beat them join them”. In many cases this is certainly the case. However, we also see various challenges when entering into such a collaboration.

This creates an unhealthy incentive if an operator of a platform is also a provider. The market master, who determines his own rules of the game, then also becomes a market trader on this same market. A platform can then better position its “own products” by placing them higher in search results. Because the administrator of the platform has all user data, he can see exactly which products sell best. Amazon is already making use of this by making ‘private label’ products cheaper and more visible.

Yet it can also pay off for organizations to join a platform. Especially bol.com or Zalando are interesting sales channels where you can reach a large audience relatively easily. A big advantage of bol.com over Amazon is that it does not yet offer private label products. At the same time, all these parties are partly shops – with their own stock and warehouse – and partly market places for other providers. Without clear rules, the incentive continues to exist to favor one’s own goods.

Do you have a unique product? Or if you have the exclusive right to sell, an online platform is quickly interesting. After all, it does not matter to customers who offers or supplies a (commodity) product. It is often the price which is the decisive factor.

Product and price determine your succes

It is important to ask yourself a few questions when considering joining a platform. Is my product unique? Can we distinguish ourselves on the platform or in customer experience (after sales)? How often does an average customer buy your product or service? Is it a one-off or repetitive sale? What do we outsource and what do we do ourselves? How do we bind the customer to us.

In addition, it is important to bear in mind that such a platform also raises certain expectations. This includes the terms of delivery, service, returns and complaints handling. When it turns out to be a success, this can also bring new challenges. Ultimately, it is up to the organization to weigh the costs of commission and – sometimes – distribution of a platform against the greater reach of potential customers. When an organization does not invest in its own distribution and marketing channels, the platform takes over this customer contact and your organization becomes enormously dependent.

Ultimately, it is very important that abuse of power and monopoly formation is actively combated. That platforms have a dominant position does not have to be a problem, as long as smaller companies have access to the online market and have a fair chance against the big (er) players. Supervision and new laws and regulations can also contribute to a healthier and more balanced online climate.

Create tracking dimension in D365FO.

When we have a close look at the InventDim table, the fields can be split up in 3 groups. These 3 groups are already represented in the existing field groups.

The investigation

As you can see there are also Russian localization field in it, those can be turned off with the configuration key “Invent tracking dimensions – GTD, inventory profile, owner.”

So now how doe we add new tracking dimensions? There is a good documentation Add new inventory dimensions through extension – Finance & Operations | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Docs

On the end there is an explanation how to add the predefined field to the product dimensions.

It is a good article with also an example code, but it will not work incase you want only a tracking dimension. To get that job don I investigated the tracking dimension Batch. The key trick for your new tracking dimension is to create a new extension of the InventTrackingDimension Class. Below picture shows the current extensions.

Lets do it

The next step is creating table extensions on the next 2 tables:

• InventDim
  • Add the InventDimension1 to the field group Tracking Dimension.
  • Create a new relation from the InventDimension1 to your new lookup table.(Below example the table name is XXTable)
• InventDimParm (Display settings)
  • Add the InventDimension1Flag to the field group Tracking Dimension.
• Create and EDT extension for the correct labels on:
  • InventDimension1
  • InventDimension1Flag

So those where the easy steps. Now we start coding. The next step is creating an (COD)extension on the next 3 tables:

[ExtensionOf(tableStr(InventDim))] final class InventDimXXDim1_Extension { public DlvTermId parmInventFlavorId(DlvTermId _XXTable = this.getValueForDimension(classStr(XXInventTrackingDimensionDim1))) { if (!prmIsDefault(_XXTable)) { this.setValueForDimension(classStr(XXInventTrackingDimensionDim1), _XXTable); } return _XXTable; } public static FieldID fieldIdFlavor() { return InventDim::fieldIdForDimension(classStr(XXInventTrackingDimensionDim1)); } }

[ExtensionOf(tableStr(InventDimParm))] final class InventDimParmXXDim1_Extension { public NoYes parmInventFlavorFlag(NoYes _flavorFlag = this.getValueForDimension(classStr(XXInventTrackingDimensionDim1))) { this.setValueForDimension(classStr(XXInventTrackingDimensionDim1), _flavorFlag); return _flavorFlag; } public static FieldID fieldIdFlavor() { return InventDimParm::fieldIdForDimension(classStr(XXInventTrackingDimensionDim1)); } }

[ExtensionOf(tableStr(InventDimFieldBinding))] public final class InventDimFieldBindingXXDim1_Extension { protected static FieldName className2FieldName(ClassName _className) { var fieldName = next className2FieldName(_className); if (_className == classStr(XXInventTrackingDimensionDim1)) { return fieldStr(InventDim, InventDimension1); } return fieldName; } }

And finally, the new extended class from InventTrackingDimension

final class XXInventTrackingDimensionDim1 extends InventTrackingDimension { public IndexId indexHintForTable(TableId _tableId) { switch (_tableId) { case tableNum(InventDim): return IndexNum(InventDim, InventDimension1Idx); } return 0; } public static XXInventTrackingDimensionDim1 getInstance() { return InventDimension::singletonFromInventDimFieldId(fieldNum(InventDim, InventDimension1)) as XXInventTrackingDimensionDim1; } public boolean isAffectingPrice() { return true; } ///Override next lines incase behavior should change public boolean checkExistsValueForItem(InventTable _inventTable, anytype _value) public boolean isSelective() public boolean isTransferReceiptMergeable() public boolean isTransferTransitReceiptMergeable() }

The whole solution would look like something like this.

The results

And of course, do not forget to turn on the configuration key for InventDimension1, testing would be impossible with out 😉. The next screen dumps show the look and feel. As you also see the Owner field is still there, I guess MS has forgotten to add a configuration key to it….