I was in the process of setting up a new environment to test out some of the AX2012 R3 CU8 updates. One of the tools that is handy for this process is the Test data transfer tool. You can get it when you log onto http://lcs.dynamics.com with the new experience, open your project and scroll across to the right you will find an icon for downloadable tools.

The installation is a simple unzip of the download file and then run the installer. It installs into this folder by default.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Test Data Transfer Tool (Beta)

You will need to access it via the command prompt as it’s just a command line utility. It is doing a bulk copy into SQL. This is handy for moving you production data to a new environment for testing. You might want to look at the tables it doesn’t export/import by default like the users. So if you do move from production to test then you will have to setup the users. You could change this behavior.

You can find the help topic here for the overview and running.

http://technet.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/dn296448.aspx

Cheers

Lachlan