Data migration tutorial for Dynamics AX

In Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 a customer can be an organization or a person. This tutorial explains how you can easily import customers as an organization or a person in just one migration, using STAEDEAN Data Migration Studio

The customer entity in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 takes advantage of the global address book (GAB). The GAB framework allows information to be shared across companies and entities. Benefits of this shared data include:

• Clear visibility of the relationships of people and organizations with other persons and business groups in the enterprise.
• Easy of setup and maintenance. For example, when a change is made to an address, the update only needs to be made in once for all of the associated records to be updated automatically.

Now, we know what GAB can do for you, let’s look at the tables. The diagram below gives an overview of the GAB tables required for this customer data migration:

Microsoft Dynamics AX global address book tables needed for the tutorial data migration

If you would like more information about GAB, please read the white paper Implementing the Global Address Book Framework by Microsoft.

Simple data migration setup

There's one more thing you need to know: The insert method on the CustTable creates a party when the party field is empty. This always results in a customer as an organization. To avoid this behavior, you need to fill in the party field before committing the customer to the database.

Ready to get practical? Download our tutorial file: Project Blog - Customers Import

Then follow the next steps to configure:

1. Import the project Project Blog - Customers Import.xml. This is the BIS project with the actual migration to import the customers as organization or person.
2. Configure the file location properties in the FastTab Migration on the project 'Blog - Customers Import'.
3. Copy the tutorial file Customers.csv to your file location.
4. Run the migration ‘Customers’ and select the tutorial file ‘Customers.csv’.

Easy, isn’t it? Please get in touch if you have any questions or comments at all.