1. Introduction
A tremendous amount of information and
functionality are available to people who work with Microsoft Dynamics
AX. Role Centers have been developed to help users manage that
information, enabling them to prioritize their tasks and make quick
business decisions.
Role Centers are available in Enterprise Portal
and the Dynamics AX client. The Role Center is the home page the user
sees when he or she starts Dynamics AX or Enterprise Portal. The Role
Center displayed is based on the user profile that the user is assigned
to.
Each Role Center is made up of different Web
parts that display job-specific business information and the Dynamics AX
functionality that the person regularly uses. For example, the Role
Center for a sales manager, the Dynamics AX persona Kevin, includes a
list of key performance indicators (KPIs) that Kevin needs to see every
day; a business overview that shows him KPI trends over time; a chart
that shows him his sales pipeline; a list of Quick Links that take him
directly to the forms, reports, and Web sites he uses regularly; and a
list of alerts and work tasks that he needs to act on. The Web parts in
Kevin’s Role Center are (optionally) interactive, enabling him to drill
down into the overview information he sees to get to the underlying data
with a few mouse clicks. Figure 1 shows Kevin’s Role Center.
Developers
can create new Role Centers and customize the out-of-the-box content,
predefined cubes, and analytical views that ship with Role Centers.
Users can personalize the personal view of their Role Center to suit
their day-to-day work.
Before we go into the details of Role Centers,
let’s take a look at some of the key benefits of using them. With Role
Centers, users can do the following:
View business data at a glance.
Users can monitor and analyze business performance using actionable
business intelligence, such as KPIs, charts, and reports directly in the
Role Center. Having this information at their fingertips allows users
to take action quickly and to drill down into details and transactions
as necessary.
Boost productivity and improve effectiveness.
Role Centers provide a single, integrated view of the job-specific
information and tasks employees need to make informed business
decisions.
Prioritize their tasks.
Role Centers can help users keep critical tasks, projects, and orders
on track with notifications and alerts initiated by automated workflows
that are displayed in the Role Center.
Get up to speed quickly.
The familiar user interface offers intuitive navigation and makes it
easy to find information, helping to minimize training time.
Personalize Role Centers. Users can easily personalize Role Centers to fit their own unique work style and information needs.
2.Inside Role Centers
In this section, we take a brief tour of the
underlying technology components that make up Role Centers. In
subsequent sections, we discuss these components in detail.
Architecture
The Enterprise Portal framework forms the
foundation for Role Centers; Role Center development takes place within
this framework. Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office
SharePoint Server form the Role Center front end, allowing developers
and users to customize and personalize a Role Center. The Dynamics AX
Reporting and Business Intelligence framework enables you to develop
reports, KPIs, and other business intelligence that can appear in a Role
Center. The Role Center framework itself consists of the following
parts:
User profiles
Role
Center Web parts, such as Cues, Quick Links, Business Overview,
Dynamics Report Server Report, and Dynamics Unified Worklist
Metadata
store for Cues, Quick Links, and Business Overview Web parts, and user
profiles in the AOT; and the import/export mechanism for Cues Quick
Links, and user profiles
Run-time style,
navigation, and interaction adaptors for the client and Enterprise
Portal, and run-time detection and rendering of Role Centers as the
start page
The
Enterprise Portal framework and the Reporting and Business Intelligence
framework use .NET Business Connector to access the metadata stored in
AOD files (represented by the Application Object Tree, or AOT) and the
transactional data stored in the Dynamics AX database. The framework
uses the ADOMD.NET data provider to get analytical data from OLAP.
Role Centers are built with Enterprise Portal
and Reporting and Business Intelligence framework components in Windows
SharePoint Services using ASP.NET. The same Role Center page is rendered
with the appropriate themes and navigation based on the client platform
(the Dynamics AX client or Enterprise Portal) on which it is hosted.
When a user accesses a Role Center through
Enterprise Portal, the master page detects the user profile of the
current users, retrieves the associated Role Center page for that user
profile, and renders it in Enterprise Portal. A Role Center is just like
any other Web part page in Windows SharePoint Services.
When a user accesses Dynamics AX
through the client, a Web browser control that is hosted for the home
tab displays the appropriate Role Center page from the Windows
SharePoint Services site. The top and left navigation are stripped off
the Web page, and a header with Role Center as the caption and a
Personalize This Page link are added. The Dynamics AX client Role Center
style sheets are applied so that the Role Center looks like other
client user interface components. Any links in the Cue, Quick Links, and
Dynamics Report Server Report Web parts point to client list pages or
forms. The browser control detects the navigation event for these links
and when clicked opens the respective client list page or form. If there
are any hyperlinks that point to other Web pages, they open in a new
browser window so that the client Role Center is never replaced with
other pages in the Dynamics AX client.
