Dynamics 365 for Operations - Exciting Announcement regarding On-Premise Deployment

Greetings!

Wanted to share this exciting news which many customers were looking forward to - Having an on-premise deployment of Dynamics 365 for Operations - aka Dynamics AX 7

Sri Srinivasan, GM for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Operations, has announced this in the community forums

https://community.dynamics.com/b/msftdynamicsblog/archive/2017/02/23/the-right-cloud-option-for-your-business

Dynamics AX 2012 R3 Troubleshoot Error Duplicate request to load user role mappings detected - KB 3158762

Issue:

For one of my client who is on AX 2012 R3 CU8, We started getting this error on 2 of our PROD AOS Event Viewer - "Duplicate request to load user mappings detected"

Fix:

After some initial troubleshooting, found out this binary hotfix in LCS, which fixes the following issue

https://fix.lcs.dynamics.com/Issue/Resolved/1118984?kb=3158762&bugId=3747718&qc=c33425bb1af0b37d6b1bdb5479e6693e13172c3a728756035b530422e296d3a8

Once you download the hotfix, just run it using the AXUpdateInstaller. It takes few mins depending on your AOS topology and servers to run this update.

Word of caution - As with any hotix (be it application or binary, always test on your TEST instances and leave it running for couple of weeks, monitor and only then deploy the hotfix to your PROD)


Notes form the hotfix description in LCS:

PROBLEM

After you apply the kernel hotfix KB3133925, when you execute the Automatic role assignment function, you receive the following error message:

"Duplicate request to load user role mappings detected."

DESCRIPTION OF CHANGE

The changes in the hotfix add the "AutoSkipXdsGeneration a_SkipXDS(ip);" line to start of AuthenticationContext.LoadRoles to ensure you can execute the Automatic role assignment function without any error messages.

How to leverage the out of the box standard data packages available in Dynamics 365 for Operations

Greeting Friends,

I was recently asked on how to retrieve all the data packages available in Dynamics 365 for Operations so that we can setup a new legal entity and populate all the necessary configuration required for each module.
Before we get into the specifics on how to do it, let’s understand some of the key terminologies 

Terminology:

a. Data Entities

Data Entities is the basic building block for any data related activities which you need to perform in the new Dynamics 365 for Operations – be it your data migration, integration, reporting and so on. You can think of data entities as a view which encapsulates the complex relationship of your underlying tables and provides you with a simple way of managing the data. For e.g. if you look at the customer data model, the underlying tables form a complex relationship between Customer and Party relationships. But with data entity, you don’t have to worry about the complex relationships and just use one simple view for managing the customer’s data. Similarly, you have data entity for all other data models in Dynamics 365 for Operations. Out of the box, we have more than 1900 data entities as of November 2016, Update

b. Data Packages

Think of Data Packages as a group of data entities and primarily used for transporting your data entities from one environment to another. You can think of a package as a collection of data entities related to a standard functionality for e.g. We can have a data package called Number Sequence Setup which will have related data entities like Number Sequence code and Number Sequence Reference data entities. We have more than 250 data packages which are available out of the box

c. Process Data Packages 

Process Data Packages also known as PDP is a collection of data packages which can be linked to a business process. The PDP is then used to configure a business process or a group of business processes in one business process library.


How to Import the out of the box standard data packages available in Dynamics 365 for Operations

1. Go to LCS > Select your Project

Next, go to Asset Library > Process Data Package as shown below

Click on Import button in Process data package and pick the relevant Process Data Package update based on your environment

It will show status as “Publishing”

Give it like a minute and the status changes to Draft

Also, you can now look into the Data Package asset type and you will see all the standard data packages populated there as shown below:

You can click one of these data package files and download it and you can view the data entities which belong to that corresponding package