My company’s coming up on AX in the near future. I’ve been tasked to “manage” security and I’ve never worked with the product before. Been researching the security aspects of it, understand it at a million-mile level, but don’t quite know how to work with it inside the tool. I’ve also played around with the Security Development Tool, and it’s given me headaches – it’s intuitive to a point, then it goes into all sorts of permissions and privileges which I can’t seem to connect. I’ve also found several tutorials and community sites with great folks that are willing to help but I think they expect a certain level of knowledge which I don’t have at this point. I need to be spoon-fed.
So I’m asking for advice from those that have recently gone through similar trials coming up to speed on AX 2012 (specifically with security if applicable). How did you do it (e.g., mentor perhaps)? What resources did you find most useful? Are there classes available and where can I find them? The company might be willing to fork out the money to take classes but I need to identify the most bang-for-the-buck courses. My frustration level is probably at a 9 on a scale of 10. Self-study isn’t yielding much beyond high-level understandings.
Thanks for allowing the venting. Any advice, direction, comments, etc would be greatly appreciated.
The book Inside Dynamics AX 2012 has a chapter that covers security. It’s somewhat useful, and the book as a whole is useful for background on AX.
If you have access to Customer Source, the Development I and II courses that you can download from there cover security to some extent, and are also good for general background. Microsoft may have instructor-led classes that are based on these courses, but I don’t really know anything about them.
I’m pretty much self-taught in AX, and, yes, it is pretty frustrating. [:)]
Thanks for the reply Andrew. Sorry for the late response – we’re going through scramble mode right now getting things ready for training and ultimately go-live in about a month’s time.
I appreciate the suggestions. I actually do have the book already but haven’t had the time to skim through it but that’s on the to-do list. I’ve reviewed the Development courses from Customer Source. Research on the Interweb has uncovered quite a few posts, blogs, and articles on the security structure. However, I haven’t found anything extremely useful for a beginner to look at, something coherent as a step by step which can help me tie in the security model concepts with the actual implementation.
I found this PDF pretty useful in providing a step-by-step tutorial on the SDT.
http://files.clickdimensions.com/junctionsolutionscom-alrj3/documents/security_development_tool_-microsoft_dynamics_ax_2012-_whitepaper.pdf
My problem was although I was able to follow along with the tutorial, at some points it just takes a left turn and I’m still heading straight. For example, on page 14 of the above mentioned SDT whitepaper, there’s a walkthrough of how to change permission to view the Production information management mode to view. Everything is understandable up to step 8 where there’s really just a statement to “select the ecoresproductdefinitionMasterinquere duty”. How am I suppose to know that as I traverse the node tree? I don’t suppose there’s a cheat sheet that identifies mapping between menu items and their corresponding AOT objects, right?
So there’s my problem, the security model is inherently understandable but as soon as you begin working with lower level objects it quickly becomes a mess. I’m hoping someone has some resource which can give me that “a-ha!” moment and help me make that connection.
Thanks in advance!