Sharing and Virtual Companies in Dynamics Ax

An often misunderstood part of Dynamics is it's ability to share information in between companies.

Why do I say that it is often misunderstood ?

Because it is presented as a solution to the much more complicated arena of multicompany / departments sharing in modern companies.

In Dynamics there is no native mechanism that enables the control / setup of such entities in the product.
You have to work and develop based on the needs of the customer the controls and mechanisms that you see are needed by the customer.

The Virtual companies are only a mechanism to start this process, they allow you to dictate that information contained in certain tables as a whole are availeable to both companies.

In every table in Dynamics Ax there is a column called DataAreaId which contains the company that the entry belongs to, and what you do when creating a virtual company is just that you replace the information contained in the row with the virtual company id and when you add companies to the virtual company you change the way they search that / those tables. Instead of using their own company id to search they use the virtual company id to search.

This basically allows one to share information / maintain / create information in a shared manner. Of course it does not really enable one to create a business unit within an organisation spanning several companies in several countries, in order to do that some work is required :-).

Later I will detail some quick solutions to some quirks in doing such sharing and illustrate by examples from implementation projects what can be done in this arena as well as some ideas of what would be nice as additions in order to support this functionality better.

/Sven