Sunday, September 24, 2017

One month later...where are we at with our R3 upgrade?

A month has passed since our original go-live date.  We have not solved our printing issue yet.

We opened a case with Microsoft and have had a number of interchanges, sent dumps and logs, done a lot of reviewing and looking.  The issue has been passed between technicians and product teams - the case has been around the globe!

We've created a fresh set of remote desktop servers pointing to a Windows 2012 report server.  We've also switched to User Profile Disk instead of roaming profiles.  We've added some additional group policies to further limit the number of printers a user will see (this we did in our current RTM production environment).  Microsoft found that we were missing a DLL related to .Net which had caused Dynamics AX to crash.  Microsoft had us compile MOF (Management Object Format) on each of our RD servers.  This corrected it TEMPORARILY!  The Microsoft case is currently in the hands of the WMI product team.

Our issue holding us from going live:  Dynamics AX will not consistently provide the correct list of printers.

We have set a new tentative go-live date which is in November.  A bit of a risk with this date since it is in a purported busy quarter for the company.  But hoping that we can resolve our issue and go-live before the end of the year.

However, we did not sit still and do nothing!

We reviewed our development queue and worked on several requests.  We set up and tested purchase requisition approval using signing limits, position hierarchy, enterprise portal, and a modified approval workflow.

We are preparing for another CRP and will perform another test upgrade.  We've started discussions with the business to get approval for the November go-live or determine when the next available window can be.

We've polled our local chapter to learn about their implementation and how they are dealing with printing.  We've picked up some ideas and will experiment with some of them in parallel to working the case with Microsoft.

The project continues...