You can collaborate in Smart Office using different tools such as chat, message boards (we call them channels) and annotations on business data. Today I’ll show you a hidden gem that involves showing your own contacts accessible right from the M3 panel.

Any panel with a RESP or USID field will get a green small person icon if that person is on you contact list. (We plan to add more fields).
It looks like this:

If I hoover over the icon I can see a tooltip with more information about the contact. Depending on how many external collaboration providers you have there can be: Smart Office contacts, Jabber and Microsoft Messenger.

I would recommend customers interested in chat within LSO or to make use of awareness in M3 to install and configure a Jabber server. Using jabber will give you instant chat. The other option to have Smart Office contacts is great because you only have to enabled it and any user that has ever logged on to Lawson Smart Office will be available.

Here comes a short list of what you need to do in order to enable Collaboration with Jabber.

1. Install a Jabber server. There are a few open source servers, we have used Open Fire here at Lawson.

2. Enable Collaboration in the profile and configure the settings to connect to your jabber server.

Notice that the setting ‘Allow personal settings’ will allow the user to specify another jabber server. This way a user can specify her own server without affecting anybody else. It is great for demo and testing.

3. Add the communicator widget to your canvas. A tip here is to write Add Communicator in start and search since it will automatically add the widget.

4. Add contacts to you contact list

If you want to play around with Jabber without installing a Jabber server you can connect to Google’s gtalk.
First you need to allow the user to override the server settings. Any settings that the user does will affect only that user. So if you want to play around with Jabber this is the way to test it for a demo or for fun.

Once the user is allowed to overwrite the settings you open the Settings window and select Lawson Smart Office.
You will have a new tab called Collaboration, see below.

In the picture I have configured the jabber collaboration service to use my Gmail account.
A more detailed explanation of how to connect to Gmail as a jabber server is found here. The article is for psi but the same settings apply.

Once the service is configured you will see a dialog that asks you to install a certificate. Install the certificate.

You need another Gmail account to act as your chat partner. Create a new account that matches a M3 user but make sure the username has at least 6 characters (Gmail requires 6 characters -just so you know). In my case I had to create a new Gmail account as well as a M3 user with the id: 309435.

Add the contact to your contact list.

Select Jabber

Enter the mail of your contact. Now depending on the type of collaboration service the search tab might be enabled. Unfortunately gtalk does not support search (Open Fire does).

Make sure your contact is responsible in for example CRS610.

Login with to Gmail with your contact.

Click the icon next to the field to chat.

Use the chat within Gmail to answer.

Do you know Lars Lawson? It’s the Lawson character from the commercials. He is available if Lawson Smart Office collaboration service is enabled. He is a Lawson Smart Office contact. Just try and find him. Let me know if you succeed! He will always answer your questions.