Product Management Update September

We are pleased to present our September Product Management Update. A lot continues to happen at Microsoft and STAEDEAN. In this issue, we will start with a general update followed by an update for different product groups or topics.

Advanced Project Management

It is likely that currently, you have been using ‘Advanced Manufacturing’ and ‘Project Planning’ to plan projects and production orders efficiently. The ‘Capacity Overview’ feature is a part of this solution.

It has been designed to provide you with  a quick overview of the capacity assigned across projects, project quotations, and production orders. It can also show you the available capacity and help you plan your resources optimally.

You can look at the capacity per role, equipment, or person based on your requirements. As a next step, you can also look at capacity per department, or filter as per other criteria such as job, position, and more, to fit the needs of your business. This is particularly interesting as out-of-the-box Dynamics offers no insight into the capacity at the role level.

Capacity level per role and person

You can now view role capacity itself and the people that fit this role. You can establish whether you are within, over, or under capacity using color codes. You can then re-assign the work to other people within the role or other roles.

Now you can assign roles to activities and view the impact on the capacity for that role. You can make optimal planning decisions without necessarily having to assign individual workers.

Dynamics Anywhere

Over the past few months, we have been working on updates to increase responsiveness, performance, and security. We have now introduced a new setting for security, which you can use to manage the number of login attempts with a related setting to configure the ‘unlock’ option.

Once there have been a certain number of wrong login attempts, a user will be locked out. Now, you can set it up to enable manual unlock or automatically unlock after a set number of minutes. This feature can help prevent unauthorized access by malicious users.

The second update on this product is called ‘Caching’. In the previous versions of Microsoft Dynamics AX, configuration was done in tables and it created or updated objects in the development environment; commonly known as the AOT.

Now in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, there is a split between the development environment and the application. Earlier, we had used the setup tables to display the menus and forms directly on the mobile device, for Anywhere. Sometimes, due to configurations in between, the mobile app could have been unreliable.

We have now introduced caching; this enables the mobile application setup to be copied to tables which will be cached. A mobility design user can now work on a new version using this feature to ensure that it will not affect actual mobile users. Another advantage is that the mobile pages can improve performance, which means response is also quicker.

RapidValue

We now have a public preview feature on Enterprise Learning Management. It is now possible to create tutorials with the task recorder and define exercises for the user. A user can undertake interactive training and assessments regardless of locations. During the learning, a user can also provide feedback on the processes.

This feature would be beneficial to customers and partners to reduce learning and enablement time and costs and help track learner progress and performance.

Security and Compliance Studio

As part of our vision and keeping in mind the feedback we got, we have provided updates in several areas.

Export security explorer objects to excel

We now offer an ‘export to excel’ in a denormalized way where, for example, based on a pinned role, the relevant details will be presented in a spreadsheet for deeper analysis or documentation.

Merge security scenarios and match role

You can now merge more than one scenario into one new scenario. This is very useful if you have multiple scenarios recorded and you want to create a role across multiple processes.

Mark any Security Role as Active/Inactive

In this update, we made an additional setup where you can mark security roles as active or inactive. This is an additional setting to make the role available for assignment, but it will give you a warning once you assign this role to a user. ‘Inactive’ is different from the standard option to disable security roles. Disabling the roles will make them invisible; however, using the inactive option is a good choice  where you need a complete overview and view how Microsoft updates are processed in the standard security objects.

Recording steps to scenario

We have provided scenarios to record menu items and build a security role quickly. We also support the scenario to record menu items that should be taken out of a certain security role. This would also help reduce license costs on existing security roles.