Last week we announced that we started working on publishing out as much of the content from the old Dynamics AX Companions resource site (www.dynamicsaxcompanions.com)
over to the new Dynamics AX Companions eBook
Store (shop.dynamicsaxcompanions.com) in preparation for the merging of the two sites.

Also along the way some of you picked up on a small note that said that if you were an eBook subscriber on the original website then you would automatically receive a Premium Subscription to the eBook store as well and not have to re-subscribe annually. Even though we buried the lead on that story at the end of the e-mail, a lot of people picked up on this and also took advantage of the current amnesty program and signed up for the eBook subscription to get all of the books and updates at no extra cost from that point on.

Also to thank all of the monthly subscribers that have also been supporting the project since it started off, we have given them all complementary Premium Subscription to the eBook store as well. We thought it was only fair since most of them have almost paid for an eBook subscription any way. It’s just our way of saying thanks.

But we realized that a Premium Subscription is not much use if there is only one guide to download so we have been furiously collecting all of the content from the old site and getting it moved over to the eBook Store and also making all of it available as a free download for anyone who has received the Premium Subscription to the site.

All 16 of the Bare Bones Configuration Guides modules,
and all 4 of the Tips & Tricks volumes are now available for download from the premium section of the website here: http://shop.dynamicsaxcompanions.com/collections/premium

If you haven’t worked through these guides and taken the Bare Bones Configuration Guide challenge to configure your very own company within Dynamics AX from scratch and become a Bare Bones Configuration Privateer then now it your chance. It comes with bragging rights and a badge:

It’s also a great way that you can learn Dynamics AX from the ground up without having to travel to training, and also to do it on a shoestring budget. The current record for completing the 10 core guides as 13.5 hours. Something you can easily start on weekend morning and be finished in time for dinner, although we may suggest that you do it over two days.

If you don’t have a subscription, and want to grab the deal a deal on the books before all of the cutover date where the old site will be put out to pasture (which at the rate that we are publishing the content won’t be too far off) and the annual membership of $199 a year to access all of the guides will become the only way you can get all of the guides that we are publishing at once, then you can take advantage of the eBook amnesty
and subscription on the Dynamics AX companions site (www.dynamicsaxcompanions.com) for perpetual license and be able to access the guides for life at no extra charge. It’s almost criminal that we are offering this.

Workspaces are a great addition to (the new) Dynamics AX because they allow you to have all of the functions that you need in order to perform a job task in one place. Out of the box, there are about forty workspaces that have been deployed, but that doesn’t mean that those are the only ones that you need to use. If there are some users within the organization that don’t quite fit into those roles, or if there are users that are a little more specialized, then you can easily create new workspaces for them through Visual Studio and tailor them just the way that you want.

This week I have been working through the process of learning how to develop the workspaces and I created this walkthrough that will show you how to do that as well and also give you a little bit of an introduction to the development environment to show that it’s really not that hard to use.

As a bonus this process will be done without a single line of code, so even if you are not a developer, you can still run through this process.

By the end you will probably be chomping at the bit to create more workspaces yourself.

We have created two different versions of the guides.

For the novice, or if you are just a mediocre programmer like me then we have created a Walkthrough Guide which has big step by step instructions on what you need to do so that if you don’t quite understand the description of the step then you can look at the picture and see what is going on.

For the expert that just needs a quick reference with all of the steps required to create the workspace then we have the Thumbnail Guide. This is a more concise version of the document – that you could actually print out if you like which gives you thumbnail (hence the name) views of the screens and still has all of the steps that you need to go through in order to set up your workspaces.

If you want to check the books out then here is a link to them on the Dynamics AX Companions Store: http://bit.ly/1pzgT6f

Also, if you are an eBook subscriber on the original Dynamics AX Companions website then there is good news. You all have been converted over to Premium Subscribers on the Dynamics AX Shop (shop.dynamicsaxcompanions.com) and if you log in there and click on the PREMIUM CONTENT menu item, then you will be able to download the complete walkthrough for free – I’m just telling you this so that you don’t e-mail us and ask why the book isn’t on the original site.

Anyone who also signs up for an eBook subscription on the Dynamics AX companions site (www.dynamicsaxcompanions.com) between now and mid-year for the one time only fee of $249 will also get upgraded to the Premium Subscription and will sidestep the upcoming recurring annual membership of $199 a year to access all of the guides through the eBook store. That’s still a great deal if you ask me.

I hope this is useful – I know that I was excited when I was finally able to start developing in the new Dynamics AX, and now that I’ve got a teste for it I think I will be a coding fool for a while.

Over the past couple of weeks we have been working on tidying up the Dynamics AX Companions eBook store (shop.dynamicsaxcompanions.com) in preparation for the merge of the store and the sister resource site (www.dynamicsaxcompanions.com) and I am happy to announce that we have made a little progress.

If you visit the eBook store (http://bit.ly/1ppjiA9) now you will see that all of the guides are a little more organized and also there is the ability to filter the guides by functional area, by Bare Bones Configuration Guide module, and also by Dynamics AX version so that you can see if any of the guides apply to AX 2012, R2, R2, and even AX7 – we are in the process of upgrading all of the guides to the new version of Dynamics AX so watch out for more news on these guides.

Also we have taken a play from the Beanie Baby franchise and retired some of the guides that are now obsolete or replaced with the newer (Second Edition) guides so that ther are not cluttering up the store and will make it easier for you to find just the resources that you are looking for.

The website content is now grouped by series to help you find what you need.

The Bare Bones Configuration Guides (http://shop.dynamicsaxcompanions.com/collections/all/series_bare-bones-configuration-guides) section contains all of the setup and training guides that we have been creating and the many of you all have been using for your own self paced training by implementing a blank instance of Dynamics AX yourself by either using a Azure hosted environment, or if you have enough horsepower, a local version of Dynamics AX that you can download from Customer/Partner Source.

One new filter option that you can take advantage of with the website is the ability to filter these guides by Design Layout of Walkthrough and Thumbnail guide.

The traditional walkthrough guides are formatted to give you a step by step guide with full screen illustrations of each of the steps to give you a visual guide as to where in the process you are. Each illustration is a great visual reference as to what you should be seeing on the screen and has a description of exactly what you need to do in order to complete the step. This is an ideal way for a novice user to step through the examples within guide.

The thumbnail guides are formatted to give you a step by step guide with thumbnail illustrations of each of the steps to give you a visual guide as to where in the process you are. Each thumbnail has a description of exactly what you need to do in order to complete the step, and is an ideal way for an experienced user to step through the examples.

Also, as we release out the Second Edition of all of the guides then you will also have the ability to access all of the guides as individual Labs which are perfect for student training guides as they are bite sized versions of each of the chapters in the original guides. You can see a couple of them on the site already but there will be more to come.

Additionally the Configuration Blueprints section (http://shop.dynamicsaxcompanions.com/collections/all/series_configuration-blueprints) contains all of the guides that are just a little too small to be included in the Bare Bones Configuration Guides or which are worked examples that may span a number of different functional areas.

And the Tips & Tricks section (http://shop.dynamicsaxcompanions.com/collections/all/series_tips-and-tricks) contains all of the morsels of information that are too small to even be Configuration Blueprints but too valuable not to forget. Over the next couple of weeks we will be transferring as many of the tips that were on the sister site over here for you all to download, with a big added benefit of indexing these by functional area so that when you are looking for information on Sales Order Management for example the tips will show up alongside all of the other big boy guides (http://shop.dynamicsaxcompanions.com/collections/all/functional-area_sales-order-management) so that it is much easier to track down just the information that you are looking for.

Just as a heads up, if you are an eBook subscriber on the original Dynamics AX Companions website then you will still be able to access all of the guides from there, but by mid-year (hopefully) we will make it possible for you all to grab all of the guides from this site as well. You all will be even luckier because we will be transitioning to an annual membership of $199 a year to access all of the guides through the eBook store, but anyone who has signed up through the eBook subscription on the Dynamics AX companions site (www.dynamicsaxcompanions.com) will have a perpetual license and be able to access the guides for life at no extra charge. That’s a great deal if you ask me.

I hope that you all like the changes that we have made to the eBook store and that it makes it easier for you all to access the content that you need for your Dynamics AX Projects.

The date of 3/9/2016 will probably go down in history along with other milestone dates in software engineering like 1/12/1997 and 4/19/2011 because, as you all may know, yesterday was the official release date of the new version of Dynamics AX.

Some of you all may know it by its full name of Microsoft Dynamics AX 7, but just like many other superstars out there like Cher, Madonna, and Sting it has dropped the last name and will forever be known as just Microsoft Dynamics AX.  It didn’t go the full route and replace its name with a symbol like the Artist that was formerly known as Prince, but there is still time.

Last year I released a guide on the new version of Microsoft Dynamics AX to help you all see what all of the fuss was about, but in the three months since it was released there have been a lot of cool changes to the user interface and some more cool features have been added to the user interface that make it even better than the pre-release so I have updated the guide to include all new screen shots of the product and also a number of new sections for you all to learn from.

This is a great reference for you all if you are

• a consultant wanting to learn how the new Microsoft Dynamics AX works, or
  
• a customer wanting to know how to navigate through the New Dynamics AX user interface, or
  
• a Demo Jockey like me and are looking for scripts on how to get the most bang out of the new Microsoft Dynamics AX presentations, or
  
• just curious about the new Microsoft Dynamics AX
  

If you want to grab a copy of the guide then just follow this link: http://bit.ly/1mAzKf6

I hope this is useful for you all, and piques your interest in the new Microsoft Dynamics AX – I know that I am super geeked about this release and already am hooked on a lot of the new features that are not available within the 2012 release.  I’m sure you all will feel the same way once you start using it.

PS. Don’t buy the version on Amazon just yet – I haven’t had time to update the contents of the book so you would be ordering an older version – but I do have a number of other books there that you may like as well… hint… hint… http://www.amazon.com/Murray-Fife/e/B00G9CNJPQ