In Smart Office you can work in a number of different applications, S3, M3, LBI, LPA the abbreviations goes on and on :-). Last week I got this question. Our customer A has 3000 M3 users but not so many LPA (Process Flow) users. Is there a way to aviod this inbasket error message for existing M3 users but non existing LPA users? There are different ways to enabled/disable applications and in this post I’ll cover all the options that are availble to you. This post applies to all versions of Smart Office and Smart client but the details on how to do the configurations will differ in early versions (pre 10.0.4).
How can you control which applications should be enabled for a user?
Before we start with the configuration of an application is has to be installed and availabe at the installation point. An application is part of a feature and there are core features core features (M3, S3, DocumentArchive, Companion etc.) that are installed as part of Smart Office and there are other features that has been installed using LifeCycle Manager seperately (Mashup Designer, Process Flow, LBI, Counter Sales etc).
There are three different ways to control which applications should be enabled:
1. Configure the allowed applications settingin Mango.Core
2. Enabled / Disable the Application Group that the application belongs to in the profiles. Disabling an Application Group will disable all applications that belong to that group. This is done in the Profile Editor (or Profile.xml file depending on version)
3. Enabled / Disable the feature in the Installation Point Manager – combined with a feature folder setting in the profile. Since this depends on the profile to be different for the two groups this case is very similar to no two in the list.
Allowed Applications
Allowed applicatins are a set of which applications (schemas) that should be allowed to be used. The allowed applications setting is found in Mango.Core and it is possible to configure a specific group to have a specific set of applications.
Note that if a user belongs to group A and group B and both group have a set of allowed applications the user will get the setting from one of the groups. There is no “join” so if the Mashup designer is only allowed in group B but the rule for group A is ranked higher then the setting for group A will be used. Below is a screen shot of what the rules can look like for the allowed applications settings.
Smart Office only supports this configuration of settings per group in version 10.0.3 and higher. In previous versions you need to configure Windows group policies to achive the same result.
Enable / Disable the application group in the profile
An application always belongs to an application group. The application group is entered in the feature manifest if you are developing your own feature. The easiest way to find what application group an application belongs to is to check the Profile editor (or the profile.xml). Applications are grouped in applications groups and the groups are visible to the left in the tool.
The application group must be enabled in the profile in order for an application to be available. So this is one of the areas that you need to check if your application isn’t running as it should. If the users are only supposed to be using one profile it is possible to configure different default profiles (per user or group) and then lock the profile setting so that user’s will not be able to change profile.
I would not recommend this approach becuase it will be hard to adjust when people need access to more profiles in the future. But is is possible to configure the system in this way and it might be OK when people use different profiles to access different systems but it will not prevent them from changing the profile and accessing the application in another profile. However in many cases, like the one in the post the issue is not that people get access to Process Flow, it’s that they get an error message becuase their user is not configure in the Process Flow backend.
Installation point manager with feature folders in the profile
This is the strangest scenario and I’m not sure if I should bring it up but it is possible to configure different feature folders for one installation point.
Feature folders and what features should be enabled are controlled in the Installation Point Manager.
The use of Feature Folders are described in this post, More than one Installation Point. What feature folder to use is entered in the profile, and since this is not a setting people might change profile and get access to the application.
How to configure allowed applications for a group?
I would recommend you to use allowed applications for this scenario. The same approach that we have for applications can be applied to widgets as well. Note that you should not disable core applciations that the framework might need. It is not possible to remove the admin tools but it is possible to remove all other application (schemas) that Smart Office uses.
Troubleshooting – My application is not running
If you are developing your own SDK application or if you are trying to run an application and it is not started you should check the following.
1. Is the feature that contains the application available in the Installation Point Manager.
2. Can you see the feature in View Features?
Select the help menu on the Canvas -> Select About Lawson Smart Office and on the About screen there is a link View Features. Click that link or enter the Url (install://aboutfeatures) directly in the Start and Search field on the Canvas.
Check the feature for any warnings.
3. Is the application group that the application belongs to enabled in your current profile?
4. Is the application configured correctly in the allowed applications?
Now if you haven’t found the issue so far. Change the log level to debug. (Found under Show -> Settings on the Canvas and then Smart Office general settings).
Restart the client and check the log for any information about the application. If you know the schema like mforms, it is a good idea to search for it in the log file.
One last question that we also get a lot. How can I configure a Mashup to be accessable for one group only? This is currently not supported. But we are considering to add this in future versions.
Developing for Infor Smart Office 
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Hi, I don’t know if thi is the correct way to ask for more info regardng this article : if I want to implement option 1 “Allowed applications” and use groups, where and how do I attach users to that group ?
Thank
Guy Geboers
Hi Guy,
In the settings editor in Smart Office next to all settings there is this small button with three dots […]. If you press that one and then create a new Rule then you should be able to add users directly or groups. The source of the groups, what system there are defined in depends on the type of session provider that you are using in the grid. The most common would be the Windows or the LDAP session provider and then you map users to groups in your Active Directory. Here at Infor I don’t have access to our corporate LDAP for our dev servers so we have our own LDAP and I use ADSI Edit to edit it. But in a customer installation with Windows session provider or LDAP you connect user’s to roles there. If you are using a DSSO session provider with LSF as identity provider you manage S3 groups/roles in LSF.
Keep in mind that you need to have a default value that only has the set of applications that everyone should use and then you need to have one rule per combination you can think of. So excluding different applications for different groups require a lot of set up.
Let me know if you have more questions.