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THE WORLD IS FLAT…..a very famous book by Thomas
Friedman on globalization and next wave of business excellently sums up the
scheme of things to come. Organizations are looking for collaborators anywhere
in the world to create a new economic order–Partnership.

I am tempted to refer to the
famous saying – "Before You Can Multiply, You Must First Learn to
Divide" If
you dissect, simply share your profits, reduce your costs and increase your
sales. Effectively for the equation Profit (P) = Sale price (S)
minus (-) Costs (C),
you are increasing the pie and sharing costs over multiple entities. It means
true financial sense for partnerships and the most effective ‘shared
risk’
model.

If we compare the…

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In an effort to help Partners prepare for a necessary online systems maintenance period occurring over the first weekend in November 2009, Microsoft Dynamics would like to advise Partners in advance regarding the availability of PartnerSource, CustomerSource, My messages, Commerce and Deployed C/Caps by region during this time.  Partners should refer to the table below to see resource availability by region.
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Microsoft are delighted to advised that following intensive testing we are confident that Order Central,  Microsoft Dynamics new online Ordering and self service system is ready to be rolled out to our Partners over the coming months.  Testing was also conducted by a selection of our Worldwide Partner. The feedback from these Partners has been very positive and they are looking forward to obtaining the benefits from Order Central for their business.
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As we move into the fall, parents
everywhere have just finished the daunting task of getting their kids ready for
the new school year.  Microsoft Dynamics
ERP partners go through a similar process as we get ready to kick-off the "Software
Evaluation Season". After almost 10 years in the channel, I hope
to offer companies seeking a new ERP solution some useful tips when beginning
their evaluation of Microsoft Dynamics AX.

TIP#1
- Begin the evaluation with a business case

I have the unique opportunity to
observe and participate in many ERP evaluations and I am constantly amazed how
many companies begin evaluating software without a business case.  The business case is a living document and
will change as you bec…

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As we move into the fall, parents
everywhere have just finished the daunting task of getting their kids ready for
the new school year.  Microsoft Dynamics
ERP partners go through a similar process as we get ready to kick-off the "Software
Evaluation Season". After almost 10 years in the channel, I hope
to offer companies seeking a new ERP solution some useful tips when beginning
their evaluation of Microsoft Dynamics AX.

TIP#1
- Begin the evaluation with a business case

I have the unique opportunity to
observe and participate in many ERP evaluations and I am constantly amazed how
many companies begin evaluating software without a business case.  The business case is a living document and
will change as you bec…

read more

Make sure to visit the author of this post!

Go directly to Source

About a milestone ago I announced SQL AOD. Since then it has been quite quiet on my blog – for two reasons 1) I’ve been heads down in new features and 2) I’ve been on paternity leave. Now the completion of M2, the next milestone of AX “6″, is within reach and I’ve returned to my office. This means I can share some more exciting news.

Since the days of AOD files are numbered we need a new vehicle for deploying metadata elements to an AX installation. To address this need we introduce Models. A model is a containment of metadata elements.

To create a model you use the new command line utility AxUtil:

This will create a new model with the name “My Model” in the USR layer. This new model can be selected in the AX client configuration utility as the default model. When you start AX the status bar will tell you which model you are currently working in – just next to where the current layer is shown. When you make changes in the AOT, like overlayering elements, creating new elements, changing X++ code etc., the resulting elements will automaticaly be contained in your model.

When you have completed all your changes, then your model is complete. In other words it is time to move the model from your developer box to a production system. In AX2009 you would copy your AOD files – with models you need to export it to a physical file. Again you will use AxUtil:

Now you can copy this file to the production system and import it there:

You can even uninstall it again – if that is what you want. This is semantically the same as deleting an AOD file in AX2009:

So far I have described the model capabilities that gives parity with AOD files: We have a file based container that can be xcopy deployed and we can delete models again.

From what I’ve described so far models aren’t much different than layers and AOD files. They are; and provide some highly desirable capabilities – which will be the topic of a near-future post – so stay tuned.

This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.

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The Microsoft Dynamics AX Sustained Engineering team is proud to announce the following compatibility between the released versions of Microsoft Dynamics AX and the Release Candidate of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2:
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For several years, Microsoft has been promising Dynamics users and partners vertical solutions–special functionality geared toward particular industries.
Now, it is delivering on the promise, beginning with Dynamics AX customers.
Microsoft announced today four acquisitions of intellectual property designed to provide industry solutions across the verticals of pharmaceuticals, food, retail, manufacturing, and professional services:

• A process manufacturing solution acquired from Fullscope Inc., which provides tight integration of business processes across discrete manufacturing and process manufacturing
• A professional service solution acquired from Computer Generated Solutions Inc., which d…

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This newsletter delivers critical program updates for Microsoft Dynamics partners in the US, including activities surrounding the MBS Competency, Microsoft Dynamics partner training and readiness events, partner program updates, resources, recognition opportunities, and much more.
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ii. With the aid of code profiler and anlaysing the report code, helped us in the following: 

    – Removed some redundant code from report methods

    – Re-wrote one report method as table methods

   This helped us in achieving 20% + in performance, The rest 80% (the considerable part) of the performance improvement came in form of adding indexes, defragmentation of indexes and updating statistics on  the table (Thanks to SQL Profiler), which is demonstrate in the next steps

Using SQL Profiler (80%)

Using SQL Profiler, helped us in the following:

     - Created missing indexes on some of the AX tables used for the report 

     – Rebuilt and Reorganized some of the indexes

     - Update statistics on the tables used for the report 

To know more about SQL Profiler (Introduction), these links should be handy:

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-5054787.html

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181091.aspx

i. Created a new SQL Profiler Trace Template for troubleshooting production schedule report  based on the Duration and Tuning default templates and filtered the report columns for database and Application name as Microsoft Dynamics AX shown below: 

  

iii.  Saved the trace to a table to enable troubleshooting on the queries which was taking longer duration. 

iv.  Queried the Trace table to extract long running queries and the table objects associated with it. The below Execution plans show the improvement in queries before and after indexing for each of the tables. 

      Also, to be noted below in the execution plans are the index lookup, Initially the lookup used to be from RID or bookmark lookup, but after indexing, the scan is done using the index lookups which

      overall improves the query performance.

     Below are the 3 table objects, identified by SQL profiler which needed some additional indexes. The below graphical plan can be generated in SQL Query Analyzer by using the Show Estimated Plan (this comes very handy when it comes to understand more from an index point of view, which index is benefitting the query and which is not)

     Custom Table (Before Indexing)    

  

 After Adding Index

ProdTable (After Index)

 

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