Tip: Connecting the Warehouse management device portal to a different company or partition in Dynamics AX

As a follow up to my blog post about fixing an annoying error with the warehouse mobile device portal (see original post here), I got a number of people asking the following question:

"How do I install/configure the mobile portal to work in more than one company/partition?"

This is possible, and relatively easy, even though it might not be the most intuitive thing to do. Here's a quick walk-through of allowing work users to access another company account portal.

The Warehouse mobile device portal (WMDP) as of today only supports connecting to a single company account in a single partition. This is driven by the Active directory account used as the identity for the IIS application pool that is used to run the WMDP.

Which means that in order to access another company, we need to:

• Create another Active directory account
• Install another instance of the WMDP
• Use a different port number than the ones already installed
• Use the above AD user as the identity for the app pool
• Add a user in AX for the above Active directory account
• Do it in the partition you want to connect to
• Set the default company to the one you want to connect to
• Don't forget to assign the correct security role
• Hint: You can also set the default user language, which will impact the WMDP site as well
• Create all the necessary Warehouse management data in the new partition/company. That includes the Display settings, Warehouse workers and mobile device users, warehouses, etc.

Note, that you should avoid having the same AD user (used for WMDP) be part of multiple partitions. Only the first partition (alphabetically) will be connected to, but it becomes confusing for people looking at the data.

Once these steps are complete, you should be able to use the new link (with the new port) to connect to the mobile device portal and log in as a work user from the new company account.

Walkthrough: Fixing error "Incorrect Mobile device display settings..." on the mobile device when trying to sign in

All the people who have tried the new Warehouse management mobile solution by now have probably hit the issue below and were confused about the error message displayed, as well as how to fix this.

The scenario is simple:

1. Install and Configure the Warehouse Mobile Device Portal through setup.exe.
As part of this step, you will need to specify a domain account to use as the identity of the IIS application pool that is used to run the Warehouse Mobile Device Portal (WMDP in short).

Warehouse Mobile Device Portal Installation Wizard

2. Completing the installation process will create a site in IIS. You can access this site, and it will open the WMDP home screen. If you now click on Log on to the mobile device, you will get the below error, if the domain account from the IIS app pool is not added as a user in Dynamics AX, or if he does not have sufficient privileges to run the mobile device portal.

WMDP error - insufficient privileges to connect to AX

3. After adding the user to AX and assigning the appropriate roles to him, you can try logging on to the mobile device again. Now, you might get a different error, like below

WMDP error - display settings are not configured

If you read the error message, you can see it complains about the mobile device display settings not being configured. Well, let's check them out, under Warehouse management > Setup > Mobile device > Work user mobile device display settings
As you can see on the below screenshot, I have them defined, and the setup is valid. Hmm, what is the above error about then?

Work user mobile device display settings

Root cause:
The problem is actually with the default company set for the above AX user. By default the portal tries to connect to the company set as the default for that user, and thus cannot find the display settings, since they are created per company and don't exist in DAT (most probably).


4. After assigning a valid default company to the AX user, the domain account of which is running the IIS app pool for WMDP, we can try logging on to the mobile device portal again. Now we can see that we reach the Sign in screen, which means all is good in the world. :)

Warehouse Mobile Device Portal Sign In page

Hope that helps avoid initial confusion when trying to use the mobile device portal!