Upgrade Issues Abound!!!

Yes, you will have issues.  There will be many.  Our upgrade (and likely yours) includes upgrades to the technical infrastructure - SQL, windows server, SharePoint, etc.  There are many scripts, manual steps, and checklists that your DBA/system administrator will need to execute.

Here is a humorous exchange between our business analyst and DBA (better than a Dilbert cartoon!):

BA: Sorry ---  another fix to add for you R3 backlog. R3 Excel Add In Issue.

DBA: Unsubscribe.

BA: Thank you for your interest in our hourly blog series: All That Is Wrong With R3 AX.

We will ensure that all your contact addresses are updated regularly with these issues as and when they are reported to our site.

Please note that we are not affiliated with any Do Not Call list and we will strive to ensure that your waking life is dominated by our posts.

 Keep track of issues encountered and what the solution was.  Build yourself a 'recipe' of steps to follow.  Please be patient with your technical staff during your upgrade project.  And for the technical staff - document, document, document!

D3FO Security Details

This blog entry is a compilation of information that I have learned.  I personally have not had the opportunity to access D3FO directly.

The Security Development Tool (SDT) that is in AX 2012 will no longer be available in Dynamics 365 for Operations (D3FO).  Microsoft has taken some of the features of this tool and implemented it within the application as a part if the initial release.  And they have intentions to release additional SDT features.

Gone from the D3FO Security menu is Security roles and Security privileges (see my unwrapped series - Explaining the Security Menu).  It is now all part of the Security configuration menu item along with features of the Security development tool.

A feature that I that I discussed in my unwrapped series - Security Add-ins that required access to the AOT has now moved within the standard user interface.  This is great news!!!  You can now find all the roles, duties, privileges that have access to a specific menu or form with a file function. From a particular record or form, go to Options and select Security Diagnostics.

Check out Alex Meyer of Fastpath blog which has some additional details about the security features in D3FO.  A big thank you goes out to Arbela and Corey Bakhtiary for putting on a webinar on February 8, 2017 to demonstrate the security functions in D3FO.

Solving the element ID issue..

In a prior post, Creating the R3 technical environment, I spoke about an element id issue:

"The second issue is element ids - Microsoft added some objects.  When we loaded our CUS layer model, we had element id conflicts.  Objects that we created in the CUS layer had the same element id as some of the new R3 Microsoft objects.  We had to update our objects to a higher unused element id number.  We will be creating a powershell script to do this in an automated fashion for future compiles."

It ended up that this was not the solution.  When working the layers rather than de-installing and installing models, you install the R3 models with the -replace command.  This retains the legacy IDs.  Each layer goes through a code upgrade.

So after another go around, we have our R3 Test environment with all custom fields and tables.

Whew!