Book review: Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 Administration Cookbook

As announced lately on LinkedIn and Twitter I would review the book Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 Administration Cookbook.

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. You can find out more about this book on the website of Packt Publishing. It is also available and reviewed on other reseller websites like Amazon and Goodreads.

That’s all for now. Till next time!