Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 EP - Admin Enhancements

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Deployment and User management of large Web sites can be taunting tasks for Administrators. The topology could be complex and knowing and installing the pre-requisites can be time consuming and tedious jobs. Having a pleasant setup and deployment experience is critical for the successful adoption of the product and EP team has invested heavily in this space to make the deployment experience better.

• Simplified Install: With a quick and simple installation and configuration process, Enterprise Portal provides a flexible deployment experience. EP can be installed with all other required components needed for development scenario by a single setup option. The pre-requisites are detected exhaustively by a separate utility which could be run ahead of deployment to verify the readiness of the machines or during the setup. You also now have the option to change the EP site url during setup.

• Maintenance: Once EP is setup, subsequent changes could be easily deployed by a command line utility. In AX 2012 the command line utility could be executed from a remote machine or admin could use the AX Client (Administration) from a remote machine.  They no longer need to locally install AX Client on the Web server and run the update only by logging in locally to the Web server. They can now do it from their desktop and pass the server name as a parameter. This simplifies the management of multiple machines from a single place. Also the command line utility provides various options to granularly deploy any EP related AOT node to any EP site or bulk update all Web sites with all changes.

• Authentication: Managing large number of external users like customers and partners in Active Directory for them to access EP has been administrative hassle in the previous versions of EP. In this release, EP supports pluggable authentication by leveraging claims-based authentication of SharePoint. Customers now have a choice to use standard windows authentication methods, or database of user names and passwords outside of AX or connecting directly to external organizations identify management system through federation.

• One Click deploy:  One click deploy option is enabled on AOT projects node, Web content node and on List Page menu item node for easy deployment to Enterprise portal web server from AOT in AX Client.