Assisted Setup in Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Recently, Encore hosted an event: “What’s New in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017”. We presented the best new Features in Dynamics NAV 2017, including assisted setup. Enjoy!

Video will start playing at the correct point in the presentation.

Transcript:

Tony: Okay. I’ll try my best, pretty far down there. So, Assisted Setup is a new feature that Microsoft has added to NAV 2017. The idea behind that is time to value. So steps that maybe you don’t want to have to go and do a bit of research, a bit of Googling, maybe go to, you know, customer source, get some training material. So common activities that you’re gonna be running, it’s gonna kind of guide you through that process. A really good example of that would be kinda Company Setup.

When you setup a brand new company, there’s a lot of standard steps that you would do. You want to fill in the company address. You want to put the logo in. You want to setup the bank details up. So the Assisted Setup is gonna help you with that when you start a brand new company. Maybe you want to pull the Tax setups in. You’re in BC, you want to pull the BC tax setup in. Or you’re doing a U.S. company, you want to bring the U.S .tax in. So the Assisted Setup is gonna kinda help you with that. It also allows you to monitor your progress.

So there are a number of different Assisted Setups. So, for example, Trevor was talking about using the usual [inaudible 00:39:56]. So Assisted Setup will help you do that, and as well can identify to you that you have completed that step. So if you’re not sure, you can go back and look at Assisted Setup, see the ones that you have completed and one that you haven’t.

Here’s some of default setup data that you can get from Assisted Setup. So you can get chart of accounts, like I said, some taxes, dimensions. You can setup templates for your customers and your vendors and your items. Those are the ones where you can setup multiple different customer templates. So this is one of my U.S. based customers. I want this to be the default. This is my Canadian based, I want that to be the default. And also data exchange definitions.

A little bit run into a bit of a demo here. What I’m gonna do is I’m going to research for Assisted Setup, if I can spell it right. So I’m gonna go to Assisted Setup, and I can see that I’ve only completed two of these. I setup my Azure Active Directory and I have setup my Approval Workflows, which we’ll come back to a little later.

But one I’m interested in is I want to setup reporting. So by setting up reporting, this is gonna create a data set that I can expose into Excel or maybe I can put it into Power BI or I can create an OData stream for any other application. And so rather of going in and having development skills to be able to do that, I can use this Assisted Setup to help me with that.

So click on that then. It kinda welcomes me, explains a little bit about what this Assisted Setup is. I’m gonna go next. I got a couple of different options here. We’re gonna come back to it. But the first one that I wanna do is I wanna create a new data set. It’s gonna give me the options to kinda name some things. So I’m gonna call it MyCustomer.

It does give you the option to select pages or queries. So any page that you have in the system, you can kinda set that up. For this demo, I’m using a query because I’ve got to reduce a customer set. So I’m gonna type query in here, type in my query idea that I setup, which is the customer list, and click Next. This will show me all of the fields that I have available based on the object type that I’ve selected.

So what I’m gonna do is I’m going to select Number, Name, Address, City and Contact. If I wanted to, I can go ahead and add filters, and these filters are not just for the fields that I have. They’re on the record sets, they’re available to me. So I can say, Add Filter. I can click on this, and I can go and choose any of the fields on the customer record. But I’m going to leave this blank for the time being.

So I’m happy with what I’ve got. So I got my number, my name, my address, city and contact. I’m going to go ahead and say, Publish. And what this has done for me is it actually created a web service. I can open it directly from here. Because I’m using OData or its JSON [SP], which is gonna try and open Visual Studio and I’m gonna get pretty boring. So what I’m actually gonna do is go over to Web Services, and we’ll see the web service that it’s created. Here’s my Customer List. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna copy this link here. I’m gonna go Excel on my local drive, and I am going to get my data from an external source. I’m gonna choose my OData feed. I’m gonna put that OData link in.

[00:43:16]
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[00:43:30]

Get MyCustomer. Next. Finish. Where do I wannna put it? And, viola! It’s gonna put me with data down. Now, the thing with this OData connection is it does read from the database. So if you wanted to save this and send it to someone, like your salespeople, you can do. And they can kind of refreshes as the data gets updated. You can save credentials in there, if you had a specific integration account you wanted use or you can force the users to use their own authentication to the database too. But it is the NAV security that it is looking at. So it’s not going to the SQL level, it is NAV that it’s authenticating it against, to make sure that I have the correct permissions.

So, although I have that customer list, I notice that I wanna send this to the salespeople and I don’t actually have an email and a phone number. So I wanna go and modify that. I’m gonna go back into NAV again. Go into my Assisted Setup. Go back to my reporting. It says I’ve completed it. Do I want to do it again? Yes, I do. I’m gonna click Next.

This time I wanna edit an existing data set. Go Next again. It’s gonna ask me which one. Well, I’ve only created one so far. It was just this query, MyCustomer. So I’m gonna go ahead and say OK. It’s gonna fill in those details so I can validate that I am modifying what I am expecting. Gonna click Next again. So I’m gonna add my phone and my email in. And then I’m gonna go ahead and publish this.

We go back to my Web Services again. We can see it’s actually as part of this cell here. It’s part of the string it’s created for OData. It does include the field names. So, now my screen resolution is all messed up. We can see it’s added contact and phone number there at the end. So again, I’m gonna go in here. I’m gonna do new sheet, back to my Data again. Get external data from other sources. OData do have these new fields at the end, so I do have to plump this back in again.

[00:45:42]
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[00:45:56]

Now I can see it’s added contact and phone number. The demo data doesn’t have a lot of phone numbers in it.

Okay, last thing I wanna do is…this is great but I got a few people that I actually I want to send this to, and now I want to include things like sales statistics. So, how much sales for this particular customer? I don’t want to send that to everybody, but this is a really a good start for what I want. So what I wanna do is copy this, and then add to it.

So again, I’m gonna kinda go back into my Assisted Setup, back into my reporting again. Yes. So now what I’m gonna say is, “Hey, I want to create a copy of an existing data set.” I’m gonna say Next, choose my existing data set. Again, we only got one, which we just modified.

Now I’m gonna say, MyCustomer, and then just put Sales at the end, so it needs to be in a new name. Come and click next. I’ve got Sales_LCY here. Publish it and finish. And now if I go back to my Web Services again, I got MyCustomerSales, can copy the cell, back into Excel…New data.

[00:47:17]
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[00:47:47]

And I put it over here, because that’s where my mouse cursor was. But you can see it back there now. We’ve got Sales_LCY, which for all of you people who’ve been using NAV for while, you know as a flow field. So it’s calculated that value for me and exposed in that OData. So the sales go through, that number is going to change as I refresh the data. So that’s a little bit of demo on Assisted Setup, any questions on that? Nope? Okay.