Why would anyone need a Business Portal query when they have Quick Query on the Dynamics SL side and Smartlists on the Dynamics GP side?
BP queries can be accessed with a $200 user via a Light User license. To use either Quick Query or Smartlists, you need a full user which could cost you $2250 for a Business Essentials user or $3980 for an Advanced Management user.
Our environments specialist put together this document below for our team to facilitate sharing a nice Business Portal query that someone invested good time into but wants to share it across the organization to get more value for the Microsoft Dynamics’ using organization.
Purpose:
To share a query in your My Queries folder with other Business Portal users by moving them to a global Shared Queries folder.
Requirements:
The queries can be created by anyone that has access to the queries page in any Business Portal center page.
The user account that will be used to move the query from the users My Queries folder to the shared queries folder must have administrative rights within Business Portal.
Note: The query will be moved from the users My Queries folder to the Shared Queries folder. If the user wants a copy of the query back in their My Queries folder they can open the query and make a copy of it back to their My Queries folder.
Creating a new Shared Queries folder
1. Open Internet Explorer and browse to the Business Portal home page.
2. On the right-hand side of the menu select Site Actions | Site Settings
3. The Site Settings page will be displayed
4. In the Business Portal Administration Menu, select Query organization.
5. The Query Organization page appears
6. Expand the QueryPages folder to expose the “shared” folder under the center page you want to create a new shared queries folder for. In this example I am going to create a new shared query folder under the shared folder in the Project center page.
7. Now select the “shared” folder and then on the menu to the left click on the Create Folder button.
8. Type in a name for the new Shared Queries folder and then click the OK button.
9. The new folder now is displayed under the “shared” folder.
Moving the personal query to the new shared queries folder
1. Stay in the Query Organization page.
2. Expand the personal folder, then expand the folder of the user that has the query to move.
3. Select the query you want to move and then click on the Move to Folder button.
4. The move query screen appears
5. Expand the tree from the QueryPages folder to the new folder you created.
6. Select the new folder and then click the OK button
7. The query is now moved to the new shared folder.
8. If you now go to the center page and open the queries you will see the query and the new folder that were created.
Query and Query Folder security
When creating a shared query folder you may want to modify the security on the folder and or on the queries within that folder differently than the default security.
Modify Folder Security
1. Go to the Business Portal home page.
2. From the menu select Site Actions | Site Settings.
3. Under the Business Portal Administration menu select Query Organization.
4. Expand the tree to the shared query folder under the center page you want to modify.
5. In this example the Company Shared Queries folder created earlier in this document will be used.
6. Select the folder then click on the Modify… button in the Security section.
7. The Modify Security screen appears
8. There are two options for security to the object Users and Roles.
a. User Security will secure the object to a single user
b. Role Security will secure the object to a Business Portal Role.
9. In my example here I am going to use Role security to the folder and give the Project Employee rights to the folder.
10. After assigning the security click on the Save button.
Modify Query Security
1. Follow the same steps for the folder security until selecting the folder, instead select the query.
Adding the moved shared query back to the personal query (My Queries) folder
1. Open the center page where the query resides. (Project in this example)
2. Click on the Queries link.
3. Expand the shared queries folder and select the query.
4. Click on Save Query
5. The Save Query screen appears
6. If you like change or modify the name of the query and then click the Save button.
7. A copy of the query is now in your My Queries folder.
