With so much happening in the world of Lawson S3 technology these days we really needed a way to communicate all the details to our customers. So welcome to this blog on everything related to Lawson technology. In the coming months you will find articles, videos, and examples of how Lawson Software can be used in your business to make life simpler and get work done faster. We hope you will subscribe to get regular updates from us. Just use the link on the right.
Getting Started Creating a Set of Personalizations
The ability to personalize S3 forms in the Lawson Smart Office is well known but there are a few tips that may help you create better personalizations that can be easily shared with other users.
First it is important to understand that a set of personalizations is called a “view”. A single form can have many views. Maybe you would like to have 2 versions of AP20, the form where Vendors are added and maintained. One version of AP20 might be for adding a international vendors and another version for domestic vendors. Maybe one version is for adding employees as vendors for paying expenses and another for adding supply vendors.
All of the views created by a single user for any particular form are kept in a single .xml (e.g. AP20.1.xml) file which is stored on the LSF server. These files can be deployed to other individual users, roles or set globally using the Personalization Manager. You must have LSO admin privilages in order to use the Personalization Manager. Non-admin users may be allowed to export thier personalizations for a form (all views) and share them with other users who are allowed to import views (export and import permissions are set in a role via the Role Manager).
In order to help you get started creating better personalizations, I recorded the video below.
Use the “HD” option in the upper right for better detail.
Lawson Smart Office in Action
Sometimes there is no substitute for seeing a product in action so I thought I would show you some of the features of LSO thru some interesting use cases. Remember, LSO is targeted at the trained end user of Lawson S3 applications with the goal of enabling them to work the way they think. This in turn will drive productivity.
Click the “HD” icon in the upper right for more detail.
Enabling a List View in a custom program
At Inforum 2012 several customers asked us to document how to enable a List View for a custom S3 form they have developed. As promised, here is a tutorial.
List Views display data normally shown on a form as a single record as a list of data from many records. It is the same data, just presented in a different way to facilitate more efficient navigation and management of the records. List Views are also valuable since you can export them to Excel, Outlook, Word, or even XML. You can even edit the records directly in the list for mass updates or edit them while viewing the list in Excel. Enabling them in a custom form isn’t hard, but it is technical, so the same programmer who created the custom form should ideally add this code as well.
So let’s take a finance form, tax code maintenance (TX02). If you wanted to manage all your tax codes as a list view you will first need to find the SELECT that will display the data you want to see in the list. SELECT’s are the way S3 identifies key data on a form. More on SELECTs is available in the Application Developer’s Workbench guide. For the Tax system you would find the $LAWDIR//txsrc/TX.sr file and search within it for the SELECT that reads and displays the records you want. In this case it looks like the “Tax Codes for Company” SELECT would work just fine. Its ID is TX-TAC-S-0001.
Lawson Smart Office and virtualized desktop environments
Virtualized desktops are a popular solution to keep IT costs of hardware and local application configuration to a minimum. However, if you want to deploy Lawson Smart Office into this kind of environment there are some things to be aware of.
What is a desktop virtualized environment?
You can read one definition on Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_virtualization but explained briefly it is an application that makes it possible to execute other applications like they where installed locally but in fact they are executed on a server somewhere and only the “screen” is transferred to the client machine. That means no code from the application is actually executed on the client machine.
Microsoft Terminal Services and Citrix are probably the most popular desktop virtualized environments. It is possible for users to start separate programs and make them appear like they are running locally. It is also possible to let the user get remote access to the entire Windows desktop.
LSO Scripting – Part 2
Most of the people who will be writing script for Lawson Smart Office have probably already used Lawson’s Design Studio to modify forms in the Lawson Portal. This post will give you an idea of what you can do with LSO Scripting and will then go into some of the differences between the Design Studio for Lawson Portal forms and Scripting for Lawson Smart Office forms.
Break for Inforum 2012!
All the blog authors are off at Inforum 2012 this week. So we are taking a little break from our weekly posting. Be sure and pay attention to all the press releases and news that comes out of Inforum this week.
If you are attending Inforum also then don’t be afraid to say hello to one of us and give feedback on the blog. There will be a many sessions on S3 Technology this year at the conference, so plan out your days wisely and take advantage of all the gurus and highly skilled folks in the Lab area as well as in the Academies and General Sessions.
See you in Denver!
LSO Changes the way everyday users consume LBI content
In the past, we positioned LBI dashboards as the UI Component that pulled together processes and the content that was driven by the process. Although dashboards still have their place in our solutions, the positioning has changed. Role-Based dashboards for trained end users of Lawson were comprised of links to forms (steps in a process) as well as links to reports and notifications that were related to the processes. This was a key differentiator and not something our competition presented. This approach to dashboards was also the basis of our messaging around Operational Business Intelligence.
With LSO, trained end users of Lawson business applications can navigate the steps in a process in a myriad of ways: Favorites in the Navigator Widget, Process Menu Widgets, and custom related links in the forms. Because LBI is no longer needed for organizing of processes, users can focus on the information in the forms and navigate in context to LBI content. Imagine being in the Accounting Unit form (GL20) and clicking on a link to view such things as an expense statement for the currently displayed Accounting Unit or a turnover report or a list of capital projects, or …. All filtered by whatever data value is on the screen.
Organizing dashboard links to LBI content by role is still important for users that will use the Portal or for users that are not Lawson Application users. This wider audience group includes department managers and executives.
LSO is now the platform that drives operational efficiency, and how users navigate to and consume LBI content has understandably changed.
Getting Started with Xcelsius and RW100
Once you have checked out the post that gives you an overview of what you can do with Xcelsius, you are ready to start building your own models. The video embedded below will take you thru how to build a model based on the output of an RW100 report. Look for future posts on using other features.
Remember to click on the “HD” option to view the best quality video.
LSO Client Installation
Today we have the benefit of a guest blogger Rickard Eklind from our Development Center in Sweden. Rickard is an expert on Lawson Smart Office (LSO) technology because he is one of the main architects. Please enjoy his post on LSO Client Installation.
Lawson Smart Office is using the Microsoft technology ClickOnce when installing on client machines. ClickOnce has some advantages and some disadvantages compared to other client installation techniques.
Advantages:
- Easy to install
- Automatic client updates.
- Possibility to have side by side installations of different versions of Smart office.
Disadvantages
- Always installs as per user and never for all users on a machine.
For a more complete comparison list see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/142dbbz4(v=vs.90).aspx
Easy to install
Lawson Smart Office is normally installed through an URL. Typical scenarios can be:
- The installer sends out an e-mail with an install link.
- Install links are presented on an intranet.
- An administrator pushes out Smart Office with the help of a start script or similar.
When installing the Smart Office server an install page is created.
The install page can be used as is or it can be modified or it has not to be used at all. The important part of the install page is the install URL. An easy way of getting the install URL is to right click on the picture and select Copy shortcut. The install URL is now in your clip board and can be pasted to a text document. This is an example of an install URL.
The install URL can be sent in an e-mail or be put on an intranet site and so on. If the server can be reached over internet external users can also install Smart Office, just remember that those users must also have access to all the back-ends specified in the System Profile.
Even if the URL is called install URL the URL can be used to start Smart Office even if it is already installed.
The first part, “http://productionserver.lawson.com:25005/LSO/LawsonClient.application”, is the URL to where the actual install binaries can be found. Read further down about the LawsonClient.application file.
Like this:
LSO Scripting – Part 1
You’ve been using Lawson Smart Office for a while, and have discovered the benefits of LSO form personalization. Now you would like to make other modifications to your forms. This is where LSO Scripting comes in. This series of posts will introduce you LSO Scripting so that you may create modifications to Lawson S3 forms beyond what is available via form personalization.
This first post will give you a brief glimpse at what you can do with LSO Scripting. Watch the video below and make sure to use the “HD” button in the upper right of the video to see the details better.
