The learning's from AX 2009 Rollout in Eastern Europe (Part-1)
The client had existing Global MS Dynamics AX 2009 SP1 centralized application for five countries and later decided to rollout their business operations as part of their business expansion and exploring Easter European markets . The roll out involved merging of the Eastern European GLS Layer with existing AX 2009 Application. Though the merging new GLS layer with Existing AX 2009 Customized application was not major challenge as we had anticipated but we faced number of issues in dealing operational issues to suit Business needs.
I will be attempting to share our rollout experience in series of blogs in coming days with risks we faced during implementation and how we managed to overcome those challenges and created another success story of MS Dynamics AX 2009 global implementation and roll out. One such challenge was to have Fiscal Printer Integration with MS Dynamics AX 2009. A fiscal printer is a special printer that is connected to a computer through a serial port or USB Port. All sales must be registered through the fiscal printer. Every printer is certified by local tax authorities and its memory is checked periodically. Types of supported printers in the local market are Posnet Thermal, and Elsa Omega. During invoice posting, necessary information is sent in proper format to fiscal printer. We encountered issues to make Fiscal printer work as AX 2009 was unable to establish the connection with fiscal Printer we had never imagined that this will be issue as AX 2009 supports Fiscal Printer Integration as per Documentation from MS. Further to add the complexity the printer was connected on Local machine on Serial Port ( RS232) and the users accessing AX 2009 Application hosted on citrix server in data centre based in UK. After lot of research and hard work by our tech team we got success in making it work for our client. Since the microsoft documentation about fiscal printer integration is bit ambiguous for benefit of larger audience, I am summarizing in brief what you need to do make this integration work.
• In order to use fiscal printer feature in AX 2009 we need to enable fiscal printers (PlFiscalPrinter) configuration key.
• Ensure that minimum AX 2009 Sp1 Kernel Rollup 5 is installed as we did not had it initially.
• AX 2009 supports only RS-232 connection and it doesn't support USB type of printers
• Thermalservicelibrary.dll need to be registered on AX 2009 AOS. The DLL gets registered under C:\Windows\System32 folder. This is nowhere mentioned in any MS documentation..
• No additional drivers or software are needed for AX 2009 and Fiscal Printer Integration.
• You need to modify The COM Port settings of the AOS Server to get Fiscal Printer working
Finally make settings in Fiscal printers Parameter menu of MS Dynamics AX 2009 Application to make the fiscal printer work. In my next blog I will continue with another challenge which we faced in our AX 2009 Sp1 roll out journey in Poland. Keep watching this space till then
Signing off for now
