In support of the Microsoft OneVersion upgrade strategy (One Version Service Update Changes) there has been, and continues to be, a continued drive to maintain alignment with the standard application and therefore minimise the risks when upgrade (Embracing the “Adopt not Adapt” approach in ERP implementation). Some of the most commonly customised areas of old, custom fields and output documents, are now configurable from the front end UI. Paul Sinnott covered off custom fields in his post Stand aside developers, we’ve got this! and my post today is aiming to provide an introduction to the extensive capabilities of configurable business documents in Business Document Management (BDMBusiness Development Managers in sales identify and pursue new business opportunities to grow an organisation.) powered by electronic reporter.
Introduction
Business Document Management (BDMBusiness Development Managers in sales identify and pursue new business opportunities to grow an organisation.) was released by Microsoft a few years ago now to improve the user experience involved in creating reports. It is still based on the ER Framework. However; now has a more intuitive interface where we can import and modify the templates of common out out reports e.g. Purchase Orders, Sales orders etc.
BDMBusiness Development Managers in sales identify and pursue new business opportunities to grow an organisation. sits in the Organisational Administration module. When accessing the space you’ll see your list of published or draft documents (or an empty workspace if starting from scratch!)
For the purpose of this blog post I will cover off the basics to get you started such as; how you can access Microsoft’s default templates and how to start editing them.
Accessing templates from ER
First up is to access the Electronic reporting workspace. You should see ‘Microsoft’ under Configuration providers. Click Repositories.
The repositories are where document templates are stored. For now, click on the Global repository and click Open on the action bar. Note the blue information message saying that the Dataverse repository will be used instead in the future.
Inside you’ll see all of the templates ready to import.
You can select specific documents or import the whole library.
Once these are imported you can return to the Business Document Management workspace.
Accessing Documents
Open the BDMBusiness Development Managers in sales identify and pursue new business opportunities to grow an organisation. workspace, click ‘New Document’ and you will see your list of imported templates. There are two more tabs on this page, ‘Upload’ (if you’ve extracted from another environment) and ‘Import’ from Dataverse repository (if the environment is connected properly to Dataverse you can skip the previous steps and access templates here).
Select the template you want to edit and click ‘Create Document’, you will be asked to name and version the document before it opens.
Document Structure
The template already contains the majority of information to suit most user requirements. However, some edits are still likely to be required.
There are three main functional items on the template to note:
- Cosmetic item: Free text cells on the template, may be descriptive. They will show on a report.
- Data item: Found within [square brackets] on the template. These will not show on a report and instead be replaced with the data they refer to.
- Bind: The bind is the link between the data item and the entity that stores the information on the document.
The document is split into sections which you can see by viewing the structure.
You can add and remove from the structure as needed using the buttons in the structure pop up. You can add a single cell, or a range depending on the type of data you plan to show on the report.
To access the binds, click the lower 3 dots and select Show bindings. The elements on the structure will show alongside the bound data.
You’ll see that a new ‘Data Sources’ area has popped up in the side view. This space shows the relevant data D365 thinks is relevant for the report. You are able to select a data item from the Sales Invoice section above, and the relevant data point and click Bind. This turns that cell/range into the source of that data on the report.
The Microsoft templates already include many of the fields to suit most clients. Besides perhaps some personalisation hopefully you’ll be safe to shrink the template rather than expand it! However, it’s worth noting that Microsoft doesn’t show every entity in the Data sources area, only those that it thinks are relevant to the template report so for some clients a little work may be required behind the scenes to access everything you need.
Document Control
Documents can have a status of ‘Draft’ or ‘Published’. A published document can be selected in Print Management for testing and use.
You can version control your document using the Version tab, which is useful if you want to make changes to a published document.
BDMBusiness Development Managers in sales identify and pursue new business opportunities to grow an organisation. is an very powerful, but also extensive, tool. This was just a brief introduction to the Business Docs Manager workspace. With Microsoft’s templates it’s easy to play around in the system and get to grips and there’s also a lot of information on Docs and YouTube around this topic.