Make Users Feel Special By Creating New Role Centers For Their Unique Roles

Dynamics AX comes pre-packaged with over 40 standard role centers for a lot of the normal user types that you would expect to see within an organization – CFO, Salesperson, AP Clerk, etc. Chances are though you probably have roles within your organization that don’t quite fit into those roles. You can either try to assign those users to one of the roles that most closely fits, or you can just create a new role centers especially for those users.

Say no to being generic.

How To Do It…

Start off by browsing to one of your default Role Center pages.

Then from the Site Actions menu, click on the View All Site Content menu item.

When the Site Contents page is displayed, click on the Enterprise Portal document library.

When the Enterprise Portal library is displayed, you will be able to see all of the default Role Center templates. They are easy to spot and all begin with RoleCenter.

To create a new Role Center template click on the New Document menu item within the Documents tab on the ribbon bar.

This will open up the New Web Part Page creation page.

Give your Role Center Template a Name and then click on the Create button.

Note: You can change the layout of the template, but it is best just to use the default.

After the new Role Center Template is created, you will be taken into the edit mode for the page. To tweak the page, click on the Add a Web Part link on any of the columns.

This will open up the Web Part browser above the page. Select any of the standard web parts delivered with SharePoint and also Dynamics AX that you want to add to the page, and then click the Add button.

In this case we added the Cues control to the page.

You can continue adding Web Parts until you are satisfied with the template. Then click the Stop Editing button on the ribbon bar.

This will take you back to the view mode and you are done with the template creation.

The next step is to create a menu item for the Role Center within AOT. To do this you can go directly into the AOT tree and drill down into the URLs node within the Web Menu Items folder of the Web group.

Right-mouse-click on the URLs node and select the New URL menu item from the context menu.

This will create a new URL record for you that we will configure to point to the Role Center that you just created.

Give the URL object a Name, Label, and Help Text.

Within the URL property, type in the relative path for the Role Center that you created. It will probably be:

/Enterprise Portal/RoleCenterName.aspx

Also, make sure that you set the HomePage field to Yes. If you don’t do this then the Role Center will open up in another window.

Once you have done that, then click the Save button in the tool bar to save the change.

Now we need to create a new User Profile. To do this, click on the User Profiles menu item within the Users folder of the Common group within the System Administration area page.

This will open up a list of all the User profiles in the system. Click on the New button within the menu bar to create a new record.

You can give your new profile a Name and a Description and from the drop down box on the Role Center field, you should be able to find the new Role Center menu that you just created.

Then click on the Users tab. To assign your users Profile click on the Add user button.

Now you can select the users that you want to assign to the role, and then click on the OK button.

Now you are done.

How It Works…

The next time your user logs in, their Role Center will be the new template that you created.

And your user is able to personalize their own custom custom role center.

Very cool.