Set the user colour theme in Dynamics 365 for Operations

We’re in the User acceptance test phase of our current project and now have users working in User acceptance test, Data migration, Training (and soon) Production environments.

One of the user personalisation options in Dynamics 365 for Operations is setting the colour theme for the environment – I’d prefer to have the option of setting a company colour (https://ideas.dynamics.com/ideas/dynamics-operations/ID0003297 ) but luckily in our current project we only have one company configured.

What we’re going to do here is set the user colour theme the same for all users, so that the users (and support staff) can readily identify which environment they are working in. Later on we might do this as a modification – for instance make this a menu option that a systems administrator could run, or write a script which we can run after we’ve copied data from one environment to another – but for now here’s a quick and simple way of doing this

1. Log into an environment (e.g. UAT) as a systems administrator and navigate to your Settings > User options:

The system displays:

2. Click Microsoft office > User information (unfiltered), and download and open the Excel spreadsheet:

You might need configure and or sign in to the Office Add-in. Configuring the office add-in is outside the scope of this blog (and a bit too technical for me).

3. Add the Theme column. Click Design:

Click the Pen icon next to the SystemUser Table:

Add ‘Theme’ to the select fields (Double-click it, or Select it and click Add):

Click Update:

Yes:

Done:

Refresh:

Click Yes, and note that the users’ existing Themes are now displayed.

4. Update the Theme and click Publish:

Check for success:

Close the spreadsheet.

If you wanted to make this process even simpler you could create a template at Common > Office integration > Excel workbook designer, but so far we haven’t felt the need to do this since the whole process as above only takes a minute or so.

Consistency check for a single item in Dynamics 365 for Operations (and AX 2012 and AX 2009).

Now here’s a funny thing. There was a posting on the Dynamics AX community forum the other day from someone working on AX2009 and they had the condition that the item’s stock on hand information (InventSum) was different from the sum of the inventory transactions (InventTrans). In the old days (AX 2009) we used to see that occasionally – more often on systems where someone was daft enough to try to customise something to do with inventory transactions. We saw it less on AX 2012 systems, and hopefully we won’t ever see it on Dynamics 365 for Operations (fingers crossed). I wasn’t expecting to find Consistency check in Dynamics 365 for Operations, but I searched for it, and up it popped:

Consistency check has been around for a while (like me), and on most systems takes ages to run – mostly it takes so long to run that it’s not usable – unless you use it selectively.

When you open Consistency check you see:

In this case I’m only interested in items and so I choose the ‘Inventory management’ module in the droplist and that filters the tree menu for me (and I’ve opened the Inventory management and Items options):

So now I can de-select the options I’m not interested in, giving:

Now for the trick – right-click on the ‘Item’ option and you get:

If you don’t right-click exactly on the Item option you don’t get the Dialog option – so if you’re not seeing that, just experiment a bit. Dialog gives us our familiar filter query screen:

Enter an item number (or a selection) and then click OK, and we are back on the main form:

There’s nothing here to indicate that our filter query is in effect but click OK and you’ll get something like:

(or something more interesting if anything is amiss).

You’ll have noticed that there’s a Check/Fix option:

If you can, try this in a copy of your production system before running it on the live system, (because I’ve seen it fix issues even if I set ‘Check’, and it can’t fix all of the issues it reports).

Dynamics 365 for Operations also has a ‘…’ ellipsis button, that’s another way to access the Dialog / Filter option, but again the Dialog option is only active if you’ve selected a relevant action option.

For instance:

But:

Another tip. Because the report is an Infolog, (and because of the long run times) you can run the consistency check as a one-off batch job (out of hours). Then you have a permanent record of the Infolog, because you can go back to the Batch job history and re-access the Infolog.

In AX2012 R3 the form looks like this:

And as previously discussed, the dialog option is only active if you have a relevant option selected in the menu tree, or you can right-click:

And in AX 2009 the form looks like this:

So you can see that not a lot has changed in the user interface.

Safety stock in Dynamics 365 for Operations (and AX 2012 and AX 2009).

Just want to point to a nice post by fellow MVP Dr Scott Hamilton on the MSDynamicsWorld.com website: Master Scheduling and the Due Dates for Safety Stock Requirements in Microsoft Dynamics AX & 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise. It’s a really nice summary of the options for setting up safety stock and highlights the all-important ‘Fulfil minimum’ parameter. He also shows a neat little work-around using the Minimum key to set (or offset) the due date of the safety stock.

My own attempt at describing the ‘Fulfil minimum’ options are here: https://timsaxblog.wordpress.com/2016/02/19/item-safety-stock-in-ax-2012/.

Finally, if you are working in recent D365FOE environments you may want to check out the Safety stock replenishment enhancements in 7.3, see (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/unified-operations/fin-and-ops/get-started/whats-new-application-7.3-update).