What this book covers

Chapter 1, Preparing for a Great Start, focuses on instituting effective project management, project governance, and resource alignment from the beginning of the project.

Chapter 2, Getting into the Details Early, focuses on the planning and execution of requirement gathering and Conference Room Pilot (CRP) sessions.

Chapter 3, Infrastructure Planning and Design, covers infrastructure planning, the architecture of production, non-production, and disaster recovery environments.

Chapter 4, Integration Planning and Design, covers integration planning, integration tools and frameworks available in Dynamics AX.

Chapter 5, Data Migration – Scoping through Delivery, discusses data migration requirements, managing data migration scope, and identifying tools and techniques for data migration and validation.

Chapter 6, Reporting and BI, covers common reporting and BI design principles and best practices.

Chapter 7, Functional and Technical Design, discusses planning and executing a functional design and a technical design. It covers tips and tricks with real-life examples of design patterns—both good and bad—to support the best practices recommended.

Chapter 8, Configuration Management, introduces you to tools and techniques used in managing configurations and moving them from one environment to another and managing configurations on larger projects to minimize conflicts and rework.

Chapter 9, Building Customizations, provides you with the best practices for customization and patterns that are recommended by Microsoft.

Chapter 10, Performance Tuning, helps you to understand architecture components that impact performance, performance and stress testing to catch issues ahead of time, and performance troubleshooting for post-production scenarios.

Chapter 11, Testing and Training, effectively manages and executes system testing and user acceptance testing. Its goal is to find issues and encourage business teams to stay engaged in spite of finding issues.

Chapter 12, Go-live Planning, defines an hour-by-hour go-live plan and reviews it with stakeholders.

Chapter 13, Post Go-live, shows you how to survive on a new system and use it to deliver value to the business.

Chapter 14, Upgrade, shows how to prepare for upgrades, upgrade planning, and preparing the business case for an upgrade. It even discusses the execution of upgrade projects and post-upgrade opportunities.