Microsoft Dynamics Ax 2012 R2 Administration Cookbook

by Simon Buxton

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 Administration Cookbook

378 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Simon Buxton is the Founder/Director of The Sacred Trust and British faculty for The Foundation For Shamanic Studies, the foremost core-shamanic training organisation in the world, directed by Dr Michael Harner. Simon has worked and trained within shamanic traditions for nearly three decades, including a thirteen year apprenticeship to a European Bee Master, as detailed within his book The Shamanic Way of the Bee, which was the recipient of the 2005 Canizares Book Award for non-fiction. He is also the co-author of Darkness Visible, and his third book, The Serpent Flight of the Honeybee is in preparation.

Simon is a Fellow of The Royal Anthropological Institute, the world's longest-established scholarly association dedicated to the furtherance of anthropology and his work has been profiled within several books including Traveling Between the Worlds by Hillary S. Webb and Soul Companions by Karen Sawyer. In 2007 Simon opened The Sacred Trust Center in Dorset, England where he conducts his writing, research and teaching work.

www.sacredtrust.org"

Reviews

[André Arnaud · Rating 4 out of 5]

The contents of the book is about administer and maintain your Dynamics AX 2012 environment in an efficiently way.  As experienced Microsoft Dynamics AX professional I assumed I was already familiar with the contents. Well… I learned some things myself as well.

The book is written by Simon Buxton. While reading you will notice he is very experienced in the Administration part of Microsoft Dynamics AX. Many real live examples are given. He tells and explains also about several issues you can encounter and how to solve or prevent them. He also provides useful links for additional information on internet like topic related links to Technet.

The book is published by Packt Publishing, like several other books related to Microsoft Dynamics AX.

The word "Cookbook" seems to be very popular these days. Within the books related to Microsoft Dynamics AX it means that the book describes many procedure are recipes. Per recipe it will tell you what to achieve and the prerequisites. Then the steps to cook are explained clearly by the author.

At first I looked at the table of contents. This looked promising. It appeared to be quite as good as my expectations. The recipes are grouped logically into the chapters. There is no specific order needed to read the book. You can start with any chapter which is most relevant for you.

The last chapter of the book is a collection of administrative tasks for the health of your AX environment. These recipes are a good "happily ever after" of the book. These performance related tasks are often overlooked in several implementations.

There is one point for criticism I want to mention. The book describes about the record-level permissions within the chapter "Setting Up and Managing Security". As the content is correct the author does not mention that this feature will be depreciated in a next version of Microsoft Dynamics AX. A new feature called eXtensible Data Security (XDS) was introduced since the initial AX 2012 release. This feature has more functionality and will replace the traditional record level security. As a security policy is created and managed in the development workspace a recipe would not be required in this book, but a system administrator should be aware of this feature as it can have impact on future upgrades.

The latest Cumulative Update (CU7) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 has some new interesting features which will also be available within the AX 2012 R3 release. If the author is planning an update of this book for the coming AX 2012 R3 release it will be worth to mention topics like AxBuild.exe, Reporting enhancements, Mobile companion apps and Lifecycle Services anyway.

I would recommend this book to system administrators at customers using Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. Also it is a good investment for a technical consultant working with an AX partner.

[Palle Agermark · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book covers a lot of ground around the administrative work implementing and maintaining a Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 installation. Some of the book is written especially for the R2 release, but most of the book also applies to the RTM release, and to some extend AX 2009.

Some things that Microsoft has documented rather cryptically is explained in much more understandable terms. For example, how to create and use claims users. In this way, the book is a good compliment to Microsoft documentation.

It is clear that Simon, the author, has a lot of hands-on experience installing and maintaining AX solutions-. He is good at point out severe pitfalls and to give good hints to things that just makes your admin-life easier when you know about them. The experienced hands-on angle is refreshing in contrast to the Microsoft documentation, which can seem to be a bit theoretically based.

On the downside, I do not think Packt have lived up to their responsibilities as editors of the book. Since the title includes the word “cookbook”, I would expect more crisp recipes. Recipes that not necessarily explain all the background stuff, but just tells me how to get the job done. If this was a real cookbook, it is like that, I am in some of the recipes taken though how an oven works and how potatoes are grown. That is not the fastest path to put dinner at the table. The background information should have been organized differently in my opinion.

The content is good and worth the investment in the book, the editorial work is less good.

[Tusar Patel]

Microsoft Dynamics Ax 2012 R2 Administration Cookbook

[Majeed Pasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

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[Lourdes Cambridge · Rating 1 out of 5]

Cooking the books.

[Aelin Galathynius]

very good book