Retail Modern POS (mPOS) installation and setup via AX 2012 R3 CU8 demo machine

When you open the AX 2012 R3 CU8 machine, you'll notice that you cannot see the Retail Modern POS (mPOS) application (Figure 1 below). Additionally, if you spend time trying to load it onto the administrator account's Windows 8 profile, you will not be able to run it. The application was specifically designed to not allow the user to run this app. So you will have to log into a different user to access it.

So the whole purpose of this post will be: 'How can I get into the mPOS'.

OPTION 1 - Use an existing user with the mPOS installed and configured
There is a user setup out of the box for this. Literally you can spin up the machine from Lifecycle Services (LCS) and start getting into the mPOS in this version. In previous versions, there were issues but it seems to have been ironed out now.

1. Log into the RDP session as contoso\Emmah, with the 'standard' AX password with the '@' sign we all know and love .
1. You will now see a number of POS registers on the desktop. If you navigate to the Start screen, you will see the Retail Modern POS (Figure 1 below) installed.
2. Click on the Retail Modern POS application
3. Enter the Device activation information in Figure 2 (or whatever yours is but this is from the demo)
4. Click 'Activate'. It will take ~15 seconds to activate as seen in Figure 3.
5. You are in the modern POS now!

Something interesting happened for me testing this route though. I was in the mPOS and poking around very casually. Then got up to get coffee, started documenting this in this blog post and noticed that the screen flashed and the app apparently crashed or something. Now the app can't be found anywhere. That's fun. So onto the second option I guess...

Figure 1 - The Retail Modern POS application

Figure 2 - The mPOS settings needed to log in

Figure 3 - The mPOS processing and activating the device

OPTION 2 - Create a new user, install the mPOS, configure, and go.

I wanted to use my own username instead of Emmah and do the configuration from beginning to end. This includes installing the mPOS on the machine for the user. Since the Emmah mPOS session crashed and apparently uninstalled itself, this option was a natural progression now.

1. Create the new user and add them to the appropriate permissions (I did admin group because I need to do a bunch of admin tasks in demos)
1. I believe you need to be an admin to install the mPOS. I haven't confirmed but I have a very strong feeling that you do.
2. Add the user to AX (not required for mPOS but I have to demo other stuff)
3. Setup the user in AX as a POS user that will ultimately get into the POS
1. I won't get into the details of how to do that in this post as that would be off topic.
4. Install the mPOS app to the user (note that the other components have already been installed on the machine
1. Navigate out to the Retail Modern POS Tools in Windows Explorer (C:\Microsoft Dynamics AX\60\Retail Modern POS\Tools)
2. In Windows Explorer, click File->Open Windows PowerShell->Open Windows PowerShell as administrator
3. UPDATE 6/21/2016: change your directory in powershell to: cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Dynamics AX\60\Retail Modern POS\tools"
4. Enter the following in PowerShell: .\Install-RetailModernPOS.ps1 -Path "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Dynamics AX\60\Retail Modern POS"
1. If you enter the location wrong, obviously you will get an error. If its correct, a bunch of stuff will occur and fly around in the PowerShell script.
2. When successful, you'll see Figure 5 below.
5. Create a new Device in AX
1. You should create a new Device in AX for every new mPOS instance (Dynamics AX->Retail->Setup->Devices)
2. If you skip this step and you activated the 'Houston-3' device like in Option 1 above, you'll get the error below in Figure 4.
3. You can skip this step if you deactivate the other device and associate it with this instance. Up to you, but I want a new device setup.
6. Activate the new device with the new user (Figure 6)
7. The mPOS will open and you can log in!
8. The device activations can be seen in Figure 7. All done!

All done! Easy enough!



Figure 4 - The error trying to activate a device that's already been activate

Figure 5 - Last part of the PowerShell script indicating everything installed correctly

Figure 6 - Activating the new device

Figure 7 - The device activations