Too often, organizations make business data and business applications available only to back-office workers. By limiting access in this way, they miss out on the benefits of providing everyone in the company with real-time information and the ability to make informed decisions quickly enough to keep up with the competitive, ever-changing business world. On the face of it, sharing business information should be straightforward, but in reality, there are some challenges, including business applications that were not designed with sharing in mind and a variety of user interfaces to choose from. Enterprise Portal in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 addresses these challenges by providing a web-based interface to the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and prebuilt support for a number of common business processes.
In Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, we've made some major improvements to Enterprise Portal to:
- Make it easier for people to complete tasks in fewer steps and in less time.
- Help businesses respond quickly to changing needs and opportunities.
- Lower the costs associated with installing and maintaining web applications and portal sites.
Easy to Use
We heard from customers and partners that the user interface has a strong influence on the adoption and, therefore, on the long-term return-on-investment (ROI) of an ERP solution. In this release, the Enterprise Portal user interface has gone through a major revision, making it much easier for business users to navigate. We modeled the user experience on the familiar Microsoft Office and Windows interfaces, so the user experience should be more intuitive and consistent across all the Microsoft products that people use every day. In addition, we reduced the number of steps required to complete common tasks and made information and actions more easily discoverable, which should reduce the time people spend completing routine tasks.
Flexible and Extensible
Our customers also tell us that they need to constantly update business processes in response to changing market conditions or to improve operational efficiencies. The latest release of Enterprise Portal supports this need for agility by simplifying the development cycle and providing a set of first-class development tools. Most notably, we've adopted a model that streamlines the development of web-based applications. The new model allows you to share code developed in either Microsoft Dynamics AX or the web-based portal environment so that less coding is required when making customizations and it's easier to maintain consistency across the two platforms. In addition, we've upgraded the development tools for Enterprise Portal so that developers can work in any standard Microsoft language. We've also made it easier for teams of developers to work on the same application.
Simple to Install and Maintain
Deploying and maintaining applications on a large website can be a daunting task for the administrator. The Enterprise Portal team has invested heavily to simplify the installation and configuration process, as well as the day-to-day maintenance of your portal site. We provide several utilities that eliminate time-consuming, tedious deployment tasks and simplify updates and remote management of multiple servers. Changes to the security model in Microsoft Dynamics AX also provide flexibility in how you choose to manage large numbers of external users.
Check out our 10 minute video with Program Manager, Anees Ansari also below or on the following link here
Share Your Thoughts
How will the ability to easily and securely share business information and complete business processes through a web-based portal change the productivity of your employees? How will it change the way you work with customers and partners?
Regards
Luke Shave
Sr. Industry Marketing Manager