Dynamics AX: Dynamics AX 7 RTW and Activation of Cloud POS

Dynamics community is abuzz now after the Virtual launch of the Dynamics AX RTW which was promoted to GA. You should be able to deploy your demo, production or dev/test environments from LCS. A lot has been written over the importance of LCS and cloud deployments, so am not going to waste time on them but going to dig right in with the deployment of Cloud POS from RTW version. There are some pre-requisites that need to be done to ensure the Cloud POS is up and running in no time.

Dynamics AX Batch management service

Dynamics AX Batch management service is responsible for executing all the batch jobs in AX. Consider it as a legacy [limited] AOS service which is stripped of all the rich client UX elements with just the business logic execution component. It is set as Automatic by default but sometimes I've found it doesn't start properly. Push it to Delayed Automatic to ensure it starts after the Server has completely booted up. You can find it under the Services,

Employee AAD entity

AX user is automatically associated with the AAD identity(office 365 poral user id aka @onmicrosoft.com account) but you would need to do a double check for the Workers to ensure the correct AAD entity is associated properly. Find out the Employee name from the User id and then go to the Employee record, link it from the Retail ribbon bar > External identity section > Associate existing identity,

Employee address book

Add a proper addressbook for the Employee, this is crucial to ensure the Cloud POS activation wizard will allow you to choose the store. I choose everything just in case;

Employee Job

Employee Julia's job scope in Marketing Executive was not part of retail, so had to choose the POS permission group as Manager to let her activate and use the Retail Cloud POS,

Screen layout

The RTW that I deployed did not have a Cloud POS screen layout profile for Houston store, so had to link one to the Store or Employee. So make sure you save the hassle by checking the profile to the Store,

Distribution schedule - Staff

Push it to the Channels, don't wonder if you don't find a separate Channel DB on the RTW demo. It is a topic for a separate post by itself. Run the Distribution Schedule for Staff.

Activation of Cloud POS

Cloud POS activation is a breeze now in RTW, with the introduction of a wizard it makes it as painless as possible for the Customers and Partners. Go to the LCS, you should be able to see the Cloud POS url or if you are in server you can access the Cloud POS from IIS manager to view the URL. The first step would be to provide the Retail Server URL to the activation wizard. You can get it from the channel profile settings too.

Click Next and it will bring out all the stores that is accessible for the Employee,

Choose the Store and click Next, in my case I used Houston,

The wizard will pick up all the Registers with their Device activation status, go ahead and pick one. I chose Houston-14

Let the wizard cook up some magic by completing the 10 step which includes creating device token, gathering device configurations, hardware profiles, number sequences, etc