Chapter 1, Extending Out with SharePoint, will show you how to take advantage of some of the features within SharePoint to help you augment data within Dynamics AX through My Sites and Document Repositories.

Chapter 2, Reports and Dashboards, shows you how to create your own ad hoc reports and dashboards by using tools that you are already using such as Excel, or by using PowerPivot and Power View to create interactive dashboards and reporting galleries.

Chapter 3, Dashboards, Charts, and Scorecards, will focus on how you can extend out Role Centers by using PerformancePoint charts and reports, and also how you can add external data such as RSS feeds and internal blog posts to Role Centers to get real-time information.

Chapter 4, Communication and Collaboration, will show how to link and use the productivity and collaboration tools such as Outlook and Lync to keep an up-to-date track on all your tasks and appointments, and also to contact others inside and outside your organization.

Chapter 5, Using Cases to Manage Incidents and Requests, will give examples of how you can use the new cases capabilities within Dynamics AX 2012 to manage and streamline your business processes.

Chapter 6, Organizing Your Workflows, shows how to take advantage of the in-built workflow capabilities in Dynamics AX 2012 to manage common business processes, and also how to develop your own workflows to manage the not so common processes.

Chapter 7, Reporting in Office, focuses on how you can use the Microsoft Dynamics AX Office Add-Ins to create report and form templates in Word and Excel that are then accessed through Dynamics AX, and also how you can use Visio to create unstructured dashboards.

Chapter 8, Talking to the Outside World, will show how you can use the Customer and Vendor portals that are delivered with Dynamics AX to share information with people outside the organization.

Chapter 9, Creating Help, will introduce the help authoring system that is built into the Dynamics AX framework, and show you how you can take advantage of it to build your own integrated help system and knowledge base.

Chapter 10, Web Services and Forms, will show you how you can use Microsoft InfoPath to create custom forms that are linked to Microsoft Dynamics AX, and also how you can use these forms to capture information for your business.

Chapter 11, Role Center Personalization and Customization, will review all of the user personalization that is available within Dynamics AX such as filtering, cues, showing, hiding and adding fields to screens, and also the creation of custom user menus.

All the examples shown in this book were done with the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 virtual machine image that was downloaded from the Microsoft CustomerSource or PartnerSource site. If you don't have your own installation of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, you can also use the images found on the Microsoft Learning Download Center. The following list of software from the virtual image was leveraged within this book:

Even though all the preceding software was used during the development and testing of the recipes in this book, they may also work on earlier versions of the software with minor tweaks and adjustments, and should also work on later versions without any changes. You can download this software from the links mentioned in the following table:

Although in some of the recipes that we will show there may be some coding required, the code itself is very simple; so you don't have to have to be a developer, just be willing to get under the Dynamics AX hood for a short time.

And, although we will be using SharePoint and Microsoft SQL Server to configure some of the examples, you don't have to be a SharePoint guru or a DBA in order to make the changes; you just need to be willing to roll your sleeves up and make a few simple tweaks here and there.

Whether you are a power user looking to fill a need, a systems administrator looking for a inexpensive solution to a solve a business problem, or a developer wanting to try out other technologies rather than spend hours coding, this is the book for you.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "From the Organization administration area page, click on the Case workflow menu item in the Cases folder of the Setup group to view all the workflows associated with cases."

A block of code is set as follows:

    <entry>
      <text>Walkthroughs</text>
      <Microsoft.Help.F1></Microsoft.Help.F1>
      <children>
        <entry>
          <text>Released Product Inventory Lookup</text>
          <Microsoft.Help.F1>108B0027-6EF1-4F3F-80A4-5A5A416FDC2C</Microsoft.Help.F1>
        </entry>
      </children>
    </entry>

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Then, click on the Save as HTML button within the Save group of the Microsoft Dynamics Help tab to publish the HTML files."

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