Lifecycle Services’ Issue Search making life easier

I’ve been playing with Lifecycle Services (LCS) for Microsoft Dynamics AX that was release in June of this year and have become a big fan of the issue search feature. LCS is a cloud-based portal for customers and their partners to manage projects, from pre-sales through implementation and operation.

To use the issue search feature, you need to create a project, from which you can then click on the Issue Search tile to begin searching.

From the search page, enter you search criteria. The KB article number if you know it,

or a search term.

Once you've found what you're looking for, click on the article link to get more information about the issue.

And here's what I love most about this new feature. From this page I can download the hotfix and evenb view the changes that have been made to the AX objects and code.

Code that is highlighted red is the code in the original version that ha changed, code that is highlighted green, is the new code provided as part of the hotfix. You can see in the example above that the change to this method is the deletion of 4 lines of code.

So why am I a big fan?

Well I think it is more to do with how poorly Microsoft has provided this feature previously. Searching for issues through Partner/Customer Source has been painful to say the least. Even armed with the KB article number often yields no results. Recently I did manage to find a KB article on Partner Source of which the content proved to be extremely helpful. The following day I could not find that same article. I had to trawl through my internet history to find it. Why didn’t I just use LCS then you ask? Well, here lies the gotcha with early adoption, while I did find the KB article easily on LCS, Partner Source had much more information. So obviously not all the KB article information has been transferred to LCS at the time of the writing of this article.

Other than just a seemingly powerful search engine for finding information about logged issues, I especially like that I can review the objects and code affected by the hotfix, without having to install it first. In my experience, it is rare to find a hotfix that only includes code for your specific issue and on the specific version of AX you require. Code analysis is usually required at some point, and to be able to do this upfront without a deployment, is a great advantage.

Still ironing out some issues with issue search

Even though my experience to date has been mostly positive, I have stumbled across the odd issue with this feature. For example, clicking on the title link of some of the issues gives an error. Also, not all KB articles provide the ability to view object and code changes.

More information please

It would be great if Microsoft provided information about the specific build the hotfix was intended for. At the moment the only information you get is major release versions, e.g. Dynamics AX 2012 or Dynamics AX 2012 R2. I deployed a hotfix on AX 2012 RTM only to find out by trial and error that it depended on CU1.

Further still, some narrative about the actual issue reported and any configuration requirements or new features introduced to address the issue would be helpful. I guess we can expect to see more of this with time.

Conclusion

The new issue search feature in LCS, though not perfect, is a vast improvement on what the Dynamics AX community has had before. Further enhancements to this, should only help to improve the often time consuming, costly and tedious process of issue resolution.