I spent the last week in Dublin, Ireland with about 2000 good friends learning about all that Microsoft has done and is looking to do with the Dynamics 365 platform, specifically around Sales (CRM) and Finance and Operations (AX) as well as the PowerBI platform that underlies both. I wanted to do a quick write-up of the different things I’ve learned and discussed.
Performance Testing
While the performance of AX is legendary for all the wrong reasons, it was well documented about steps you could take. With D365O, performance testing has definitely not been ironed out completely yet. I sat through a session that had a number of different tips/features/tricks that a client/partner/ISV could use to help with performance issues.
- Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS) Monitoring
- System Diagnostics
- Telemetry
- UI Dynamics 365FO Tools
- Application execution trace and Trace Parser
- Perf timer
- Web browser tools: Performance profiler of web browser (F12)
- Others
- Task Manager
- Performance Monitor
- SQL Trace
Some of these tools would have to be ran in a T1/Dev box and others could be ran in any environment.
It’s also important as the support/troubleshooting person to collect the Right Information About the Issue:
- Identify time and user when issue occurred
- Can the issue be consistently reproduced on another environment?
- Try to manage to collect an Application Execution Trace
- What else is running at the error/issue time? (batch processes etc)
- In LCS ‘SQL Now’ page, are there any blocking issues?
- Is a customization involved?
Data Entities
- XDS is not honored for data entities, it is currently being worked on by Microsoft
GDPR
Lots of sessions this last week were about the impacts of the new GDPR legislation that is going into affect in May. Here are some of the highlights of different things Microsoft is doing to help meet this new regulation (above and beyond what is already available):
- New parameter on tables called ‘Asset Classification’ available in PU14 and newer which designates whether the table could potentially have personally identifiable information (PII)
- Microsoft will be releasing an Excel document listing all of the out of box table/field combinations that it is deeming to possibly contain PII
- Microsoft is developing a tool to help discovery forms/tables that may have PII called Form Data Discovery Table which shows the relationship between Entity -> Form -> PII table/fields
- There will be a feature in D365FO called Person Search were you are able to search for where PII information resides by having any piece of information about the user (Party Number, User Name, Email, etc)
- Roles now have a metadata data element called ‘Sensitive Data’, which is just a checkbox that allows you to designate whether the role is allowed to see/edit PII or not
I plan on doing a more in-depth blog post about this topic and go into each point with much more detail.
CDS
Now built on XRM platform, which means that it has all of the characteristics of CRM which include:
- Follows the CRM security model
- Any customization written for CRM will work for CDS
- All GDPR solutions that work for CRM will work for CDS
Summit Focus 2018
I will be presenting a number of sessions (with my Fastpath sidekick from Summit EMEA Frank Vukovits) at Summit Focus 2018 May 21st-24th including:
Building a Sound Security & Compliance Environment for Dynamics AX 2009 and Beyond
Is Configuring User Security Making You Crazy?
Security in AX 2009/212 and What You’re Getting in D365FO
It should be a great conference, if you are interested I hope you can make it!