Planning Considerations for Reporting

It is recommended that you consider the following information before
implementing the reporting features of Microsoft Dynamics AX.

Topology

Before selecting a topology, consider the following question.Will you implement Reporting Services in a scale-out
deployment or failover cluster?

Reporting Services offers several approaches for deploying server components.

• Scale-out deployment: A report server scale-out deployment is two
or more report server instances that share a single report server
database. A scale-out deployment enables you to increase the
number of users who concurrently access reports and improve the
availability of the report server. For more information, refer to the
SQL Server documentation on TechNet.

• Failover cluster: SQL Server provides failover clustering support so
that you can use multiple disks for one or more SQL Server
instances. Failover clustering is supported only for the report server
database; you cannot run the Reporting Services Windows service as
part of a failover cluster. For more information, refer to the SQL
Server documentation on TechNet.

Security

To help plan for security, consider the following question.

Who should have access to each report?

Determine who should have access to each report. To grant users access to
reports, you will need to do the following:

1. Assign users to roles and tasks in Microsoft Dynamics AX. For more
information, refer to MSDN or TechNet.

2. Set up security in Reporting Services. For more information, see the
SQL Server documentation on TechNet.

Have you assigned users to Analysis Services roles?

Some reports use online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes to access data. In
order for users to view data on such reports, you must assign users to roles in
SQL Server Analysis Services. For more information, Planning considerations
for analytics on TechNet. 

Customizations

To help plan any customizations you may need to implement, consider the
following questions.

Will you need to create new, custom reports?

If you or anyone in your organization needs to create a new, custom report, there
are several tools available. For example, you could use the Auto-report Wizard in
Microsoft Dynamics AX to create a list of customers in a specific sales territory.
Or you could use the Data Connection Wizard in Excel to create a PivotChart
report that shows the sum of sales for each salesperson by product in all regions
over all recorded years.

Which license keys and configuration keys do you use?

Functionality in Microsoft Dynamics AX can be turned on or off depending on
license and configuration keys.

• A license key controls the modules that are available to you. For
example, if you have the Additional Modules license, you can use
the Human Resources I and Human Resources II modules. License
keys must be purchased.

• A configuration key controls the functionality that is available to you
within a module. For example, if you have the Recruiting
(HRMMangementRecruting) configuration key, you can use the
recruiting forms and functionality in the Human Resources II
module.

Some reports use online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes to access data. The
default OLAP cubes that are provided with Microsoft Dynamics AX require full
license and configuration keys. When you turn off license or configuration keys,
data is removed from corresponding columns in the online transaction processing
(OLTP) database. As a result, cubes cannot access the data they were designed to
retrieve. This means that you may see errors displayed in reports and Role Center
web parts that use cubes as a data source. You will need to modify these reports
and web parts so that they no longer try to retrieve data from a column or field
that contains no data. 

Regards,
Hossein Karimi