Regression Suite Automation Tool, a day in a live
We have been working for a while now with RSAT at various customers, it is stable, but we see sometime small glitches in user experience. In general, what is happening, if you haven’t maintained/used it for a while (for instance when during implementation RSAT is configured and used (for instance as provisioning tool), but then not actively monitored for some time) and a consultant or customer starts using it does not work (as expected). So, let us address some topics you should check before (re)using RSAT. Below is a list based on using RSAT for the last 2 years.
LCS (Lifecycle Services) Project Azure trust expires (every year)
There is a trust between DevOps and LCS, the maximum trust time is one year.
Getting a new token at: https://XXX.visualstudio.com/_usersSettings/token
In case the access token is expired, update it from LCS
For more information about integration of LCS and Dev Ops please read Is your Business Process Modeler updated? – Kaya Consulting (kaya-consulting.com)
Are the soap names still, correct?
Unbelievably, there are a lot of incorrect solutions in the MS communities, with all distinct kinds of suggestions, starting from adding only soap or at the wrong place in the URL. The correct location is:
• Tier 2 XXXXXaossoap.sandbox.operations.dynamics.com
• Tier 1 XXXXXaossoap.cloudax.dynamics.com
Limitation on the test user (the consultant test partner account)
The test user must be active in the tenant domain of the customer. In general, always try to avoid using non-customer tenant users as also uploading the task recording directly into LCS, has similar issues. The tenant domain is visual in D365 at right top, click the question mark and about, tab page licenses.
Validate the certificates
And those are the nasty ones, I have seen a lot of Non-RTFM issues here. So, let us start addressing them by environment type. We will first start Microsoft Management Console for validating the certificates.
• Start mmc.exe
• We add the snap ins for certificates; for the current user and local computer.
It is wise to save this console setup after validating and fixing!
Tier 1 dev box
When you create a certificate for a Tier 1 and look at the pulldown, we can agree, no clue, what is meant here?
Adding a user-friendly meaningful name to the certificate will help you, this can be done by pressing the right mouse and selecting properties.
Meaningful names will result in clear names on the pull down for the Thumbprints.
Wif.config
There is a widespread misconception that pressing New in the RSAT tool also adapts the config file on the remote dev box. Sorry, technical consultants can perform miracles, but this is not one of them. So please open your remote desktop to the Dev Box and validate it!
Tier 2 environments
Be aware that platform updates also update the RSAT certificates. Last week I checked all on Monday and on Friday constant complaints, it is not working. That they did a platform update during that week, they forgot to tell me ????
Maintain Certificates RSAT Tool
Working with the Maintain Certificates RSAT Tool. It is not perfect yet. The Tier 1 and production should not appear on the list.
The user-friendly meaningful names are missing (but you know how to fix this now)
So, you change to the meaningful name. But it is still not working. You get the next error.
It took me some time to figure out this one. Please look at the next pictures on how to resolve this. I think MS will fix this in their next release.
And if we compare it with the certificate I imported the old way, we see a difference. With below certificate RSAT can pull a token.
Microsoft is on the right track with the Maintain Certificates RSAT Tool. So, we follow Frank Dahl and support him with valuable feedback.
Conclusion
Despite the above, I am still a happy user of RSAT!
For more details about RSAT please look at.
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How to stay in control of customer balances (Part 1)
Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&O provides several tools “out of the box” to manage the whole “Credit and collections” process. In this three-part blog series, I will highlight a number of components to come up with a “best practice” that can be used to stay in control of your outstanding customer invoices.
To get a good grip on your open customer transactions (Customer balances), start with capturing the right data in the Customer master. For this, you first need to do some basic setup settings, of which the most important ones are:
1. Customer group (mandatory in D365)
Grouping your customers correctly is essential for proper reporting and is the key to good accounts receivable management. How you should group depends partly on:
- Do you have an intercompany relationship? (In that case, a separate customer group is needed, or at least strongly advised.)
- Are you part of a group/collaboration (e.g., a franchise organization or a holding)? (This can also be a reason for a separate group if you have a special contract about payment terms, consolidation, etc.)
- Furthermore, you can also group all third-party customers based on various shared characteristics, e.g., the payment term or the sales tax group.
2. Terms of payment
This setup is essential for determining the Due Date of the invoice, but also for possible discounts related to payment behavior. Try to set up a company standard for this. This keeps everything clear and prevents errors when creating transactions, although D365 does support any variant that you may agree upon with the customer.
3. Methods of payment
My advice is to set up a minimum of one Method of Payment. For example, “Invoice” for invoices paid by bank transfer. When you have B2B/B2C direct debit customers or use payment providers for web shop sales, you need to set up more Methods of Payment.
When creating Customer master:
- Main address information. Full postal address details are needed for different Purposes or combinations of Purposes.
- Contact information. Here, you can set up (primary) contact information for different Purposes. By using the Advanced option, you can add “Email account” for Invoice. This is for sending invoices as email attachments.
- Collections contact (Credit and collections). Here, you can set up a contact person/department with an email address for sending Collection letters directly out of Dynamics 365. Don’t forget to register phone numbers. Personal contact can result in better payment behavior of the customer.
- Employee responsible (Sales demographics). This is the internal responsible person for this customer account. This information can be important for internal reporting and external communication to the customer in case of late payments of the invoices. When sending reminders by email, the responsible person can also automatically be sent a duplicate reminder.
- Primary contact (Sales demographics). This is the external responsible person for this account, in most cases the purchase responsible from the customer.
- Other defaults: Terms of payment, Sales tax group, Tax exempt number and Currency. After using the right information in the Customer master combined with the right information from Free text invoice or from Invoicing sales orders, the posted invoices will generate a usable Open Customer transaction.
If the right information is registered in the Customer master, invoices and reminders will always be sent to the correct person. This will help with the on-time payment of customers!
Many customers think they can save money by paying late, but in my opinion, you can save more by making a good trade agreement and paying on time, with the right (cash) discount agreements. Of course, this is currently very relevant in connection with the low interest rates, and even negative interest on high bank account balances.
Now, you are ready to process the Customer payments. Hopefully, most of the invoices will be paid on time by the customer. If they don’t pay on time, we must start the Collections process!
In the next blog of this series, I’ll look deeper into the Collections process.
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Dynamics AX 2012 to D365 F&O cookbook
Dynamics AX 2012 to D365 F&O cookbook
I have done a lot of data migrations, but to be honest, I do not like the complete data and code migration.
So yes, I do the code migration, but the migrated code is, from my point of view, just a library with possible reusable solutions. We always refactor this code, but that will have an impact on data migration. So, how can we do it correctly? We create the new master data, and when this task is completed, you must migrate to the next topics. The trick is that you also must add the customizations from above topics on the data entities. This trick will even work for AX 2009. So, here is an overview of all that needs to be exported.
What should you export?
- Customers
- Sales tax exempt numbers
- Customer definitions
- Customer details V2
- Customer bank accounts
- Customer postal addresses
- Global address book V2
- Contacts V2
- Party contacts V3
- Vendors
- Sales tax exempt numbers
- Vendors V2
- Vendor bank accounts
- Vendor postal addresses
- Global address book V2
- Contacts V2
- Party contacts V3
- Products
- Products V2
- Product variants V2
- Product master configurations
- Released products V2
- Released product variants V2
- Sales orders remain delivery
- Sales order headers V2
- Sales order lines V2
- Purchase orders remain delivery
- Purchase order headers V2
- Purchase order lines V2
- Trade agreements
- Excel plug in
- On hand (Available + reserved)
- Movement Journal and Excel plug in
- Vend trans Open
- General Journal and Excel plug in
- Cust Trans Open
- General Journal and Excel plug in
- Bank accounts
- General Journal and Excel plug in
- P&L balance
- General Journal and Excel plug in
In case you have more parts to import, check the templates, this is a good start.
Data Entities vs SQL Views
As you can see, there are a lot of Excels to create. So, can we automate that? Yes, we can! But you must understand how the data import framework works in D365FO. You must know that any data entity is also a view on SQL. So, start a Tier 1 dev box and export those views to a SQL create script. Let’s look at the following examples.
In the next picture, you can see how the SQL View looks like the Visual Studio Entity.
Now, you must export the view from SQL Studio.
Let’s export, YEH!!
Next step is to import those views in AX 2012. I strongly recommend changing the view names to the functional names from the above list (use an underscore for the spaces). After creating all those views on AX 2012, the last step is to create an export file in Excel format.
The Source format will be your AX 2012 Prod Database and your target will be Microsoft Excel. Select your views.
In this example, I did not have the view names renamed to the functional entity name (example is from the start from my learning curve 😉). And at the end, you get a nice Excel with multiple tab pages, which you can easily copy to your import source files. You would preferably use functional names, so the tab pages are more in line with the import Excel files names.
Let’s import
After you copy the tab page to their dedicated Excel sheets, copy those back in the zip file and finally import, it will look like this. (Note: the zip file is created by first exporting the data from D365FO. This will result in the empty Excel file in the zip file.)
Some advice
- Create consistency queries in AX 2012 and check below topics. It is better to find them here than when you are importing it in D365FO.
- Is the invoice account of the customer account also migrated?
- Is the primary vendor of the item migrated?
- Are all contact persons migrated related to the customers and vendors?
- Do we have obsolete addresses on the sales and purchase orders?
- This happens when the address of the customer or vendor is updated and after that the sales or purchase order did not get updated.
- Are all customers or vendors in relation to customer and vendor transactions open migrated?
- Data time: Of course, this view will not match so you must adapt the queries. Issues like from and to date
- Another painful thing is the table inheritance, the table ID in D365FO can be different than in AX 2012
- The relation roles were also something like that
- Cust and vend trans open scope
- Only open sales lines
- Only open purchase lines
- On hand, yes, we can simulate a little FIFO. The Invent Sum table has a modified Date Time. This tells us when that item was touched for the last time.
- So incredibly old Date Times will look like this in your warehouse:
- Out of the box, the sales line number cannot be imported, so you must extend the Sales order lines V2 Entity. You should also look at the marking between sales and the Purch line. My advice is to import the Purch lines first, and after that the sales lines. On the sales line entity, search for the related Purch line. When the Purch line is not found, this does not mean it is an error, because the related Purch line could be skipped on data migration. Also be sure the formulas are available before importing the sales and Purch lines, otherwise your inventory transaction values have the wrong values…
If something goes wrong and you need to fix your errors, a previous blog can help you to export your errors into Excel and then import them again.