Request Quickstart/Better readme.

[OranguTech]

Hi, I was excited to find an FO module, but just getting started has been rough.

1 - I was surprised and not-delighted that installing the module from PSGallery automatically started installing a bunch of dependencies that weren't mentioned anywhere. Highly recommend adding those to readme.

2 - No other mention of requirements, which versions of D365 FO are supported, are On-Prem installs supported, OneBox VMs, etc?

3 - I finally found mention of Set-D365WorkstationMode -Enabled $true, tried that (with new session), but still no dice. Since Get-D365ProductInformation fails looking for an AOS path, I'm going to assume connecting to an FO instance remotely isn't supported. Does it need to be on an AOS node specifically?

4 - I'd highly recommend a quick "Here's how to check if a connection is working" quickstart section. I'd create my a PR myself if I could figure it out enough to get up and running...

It looks like it's a small team contributing, so I understand that documentation can easily be lower priority, but it's very difficult to contribute when you can't started. Thanks for your work!

[Splaxi]

Hi,

Thanks for taking the time to provide some feedback on the readme and lacking onboarding guides.

The modules true powers shines mostly running directly on a developer VM. Be that a LCS deployed VM, Azure hosted or be that an OneBox VM (VHD downloaded from LCS). On-prem isn't a focus point for these tools, but I know several people out in the wild that use some parts of the module, while others have built on-prem specific modules to solves some pain points from that.

With your struggle fresh in mind, we have a great opportunity to refactor the readme file.

So after my brief introduction in this discussion, which parts of that should I add and how can we make sure that people. If you want to help me with that part, where we just brainstorm it, I can do the PR to update the readme.

On the dependency comment - I heard you, but most people that are using the tools either don't care or they know how to locate that information on powershell gallery. The powershell gallery metadata doesn't require us to keep the readme file up to date, but we could make a compromise, where we state clearly that there are dependencies and point to the powershellgallery details, where they can be located. Would that work for you?

On the versions comment - We actually try very hard to keep the older versions included, because we know that customers don't upgrade / patch in the same pace. With that said, we also follow the lead from Microsoft, and they only support the latest 3 versions. So we people file bugs / issues for like 5+ versions back, we try and mitigate it, provide work arounds or ask them to help us fix the problem that they are facing. Would a statement like this make a difference?

[Splaxi]

But the tools also shines in an Azure DevOps pipeline, because it simplifies many aspects of working with the LCS API endpoints.

Did you take a look at our wiki?

[OranguTech]

@Splaxi - Thanks for responding so quickly, sorry it took 20(!) days for myself. (I was in some MS-provided AX training last week.)
In retrospect maybe this would have been better as a "discussion", I'd be happy to move the relevant sections there.

A quick note about dependencies and grabbing them from PSGallery would be a good step.

I did see the wiki. It goes from very basic "here's how to do powershell things" to "Here's AX, have fun", which makes sense given the context, but is a nearly perfect mismatch for my knowledge domain. :)

Our devs are 90% on Onebox VMs (hosted on-prem or occasionally on-workstation), I'll play around on one and see what works/what value it has for us.

What I'm really hoping/looking for is a programmatic way to query/change batch jobs: Both status and, ideally, definitions. Currently we're (Dev/SysOps) being handed post deployment instructions and manually creating batches in the GUI, which seems ludicrous to me. Additionally, we've had issues with batch jobs being stuck/corrupted if some are in process during a deployment, so we have to withold them, deploy, then resume. Again, all via GUI. If we can manage some of that (eventually would be rolled into an AzDO pipeline), what would be spectacular.

[Splaxi]

Let's see if we can make it better together.

I'll do some edits on the readme, and tag you on the Pull Request - then you can see if we need adjustment.

Yeah - I can see how it is a perfect mismatch if people are just learning about the Dynamics 365 FnO/SCM. The tools are actually target for your audience, when you have enough basic knowledge about what you need/want - then you see what gaps we're trying to fill.

Are you doing to support the business with data fresh from PROD -> Tier2 -> Dev boxes? If so - then stick around and let me point you to some blog posts, that utilizes the tools, to achieve that. For all our customers, we are automating 90-100% of the data refresh from PROD via Tier2 and all the way to a developer box.

For the batch issues that you are mentioning, you are hitting the soft spot in the Dynamics 365 FnO platform. There are no great ways to handle what you're after, out of the box at least. I know about a single customer that is going to implement custom services, which will offer the capabilities you're after. So they are more or less after the same as you, but they also want to control the batch jobs and groups in the lower environments are data refresh.

So you will need to team up with your developers and have the business onboard on a micro project, where you implement different custom services / custom OData entities, for you to query or configure theses things. Start small with things to query and to change state for a batch job. And see if you really need the definition stuff as well, because getting that to work isn't a trivial task.

You will need to work against the Dynamics 365 FnO platform via OAuth 2.0, but I have open source powershell modules for that as well, so let me know when you need an introduction for that as well. Then you can provide more feedback and help me improve those.