Global Address Book
Purpose:
Purpose of this article is to get an understanding of Shared Entities in Dynamics AX. First of all, we will pick Global Address Book framework, first time introduced in Dynamics AX 2009 and enhanced in Dynamics AX 2012. By shared entities, we mean all that information which is normalized for the purpose of being shared among different AX companies or throughout application.
Global Address Book:
Global Address Book, in Oracle EBS we call it Trade Community Architecture. It was one of the most complex architecture covering all possible complex relations among business entities. Following are some of key components of Global Address Book
Party:
A party can be any entity customer, vendor, prospect which interacts with company. In Dynamics AX 2012, Party data is not stored as per company as it was done in previous version and was shared among companies by using virtual tables. If we want to restrict parties to a user by legal entity or Address book, we can do it by using extensible data security (Will be discussed in details later).
Party Roles:
Entities interacting with company are classified as Company, Customer, Vendor, Prospect, Worker and Applicant etc. called Party Roles. A party can have different roles within a company or across companies. For example a customer in Company A, can be a supplier in Company B or a supplier in same Company A.
Locations:
Locations can be any physical or logical addresses of entities or companies. Locations are also shared among different entities. Idea behind locations is same as of Party, normalization and sharing.
In future series, we will further look into its technical architecture.
