Smart Office 10.2

Smart Office 10.2 is released for M3! I don’t have a release date for Lawson Applications but I will let you know as soon as it is released. This post contains overview information about the new features that we have developed in 10.2 for both M3 and Lawson applications. There are many new features and we will start a series of posts to cover all new functionality in greater detail.

Feature updates – all installations

Features delivered as seperate packages

  • The Infor Lawson Business Intelligence feature will be delivered independently of Smart Office.
  • The Search feature will be delivered independently of Smart Office.

Infor Infor Ming.le™ in Smart Office

With InforInfor Ming.le™ Enterprise API you get access to a lot of great Infor Ming.le™ functionality in Smart Office.
The features and widgets described below require Infor Ming.le™ Enterprise API 11.1.1 to be installed and configured.

  • Infor Ming.le™ Notifications for the current user are displayed in Smart Office.
  • User can work with Posts, Alerts, and Tasks in Smart Office
  • Infor Ming.le™ drillback links are supported in Smart Office for M3 Applications and Lawson Applications.
  • Possible to share information directly from an application in Smart Office to Infor Ming.le™ or from the canvas.

MingleNotifications
The notifications are shown in the taskbar of Smart Office.

MingleWidgets
There are a total of three new Infor Ming.le™ widgets.

Collaboration

The entire way of collaborating in Smart Office has been rebuilt. The changes include updates to the UI, several new features, and more straightforward ways of communicating and sharing information with other users. The following are added features and enhancements to Collaboration:

  • Communicator widget with instant chat, group communication and the possibility to send files.
  • Screen sharing
  • Smart Office content sharing
  • Notifications
  • Paint

On the other hand the channels that you could create as well as the broadcast channel has been removed. We recommend you to use Ming.le Streams for this kind of functionality.

We will have another post just on this topic.

Chat

Infor Document Management

The APIs for Infor Document Management have changed in IDM version 10.1.0. In order to enhance the user experience for IDM in Smart Office, there is a rewritten improved IDM client in Smart Office 10.2. This new client is using the new APIs of IDM 10.1.0. Thus, to use Smart Office 10.2 with IDM, the IDM version must be 10.1.0 or later.

IDM 10.1.0 still contains the old APIs but they are deprecated. This means that older versions of Smart Office will work with IDM version including and up to 10.1.0. In IDM version 11 and later, the old APIs are removed. This means you have to understand that upgrading IDM may affect your Smart Office installation.

This also means that when upgrading to releases of IDM later than 10.1.0, your JScript and SDK code in Smart Office that use IDM APIs will stop working. You will have to rewrite this code to use the new IDM APIs.

New widgets

Except for theInfor Ming.le™ widgets there three other new widgets.

Image Widget – This widget allows users to create a slideshow of images in the Smart Office canvas. It also possible to share the uploaded images with other users.
ImageWidget

Custom Menu – This widget lets users create their own menu with links and checkboxes.
CustomMenu

Log Viewer – Users can use this widget to view log entries in real time. This is a great tool for developers and testers and we encurage all team members to have this widget on their canvas. You can set a seperate filter in the widget settings but remember to check the log level setting in the User Settings (Smart Office section) as well. The widget can filter out according to a specified level but if you would like to get debug entries you need make sure you have that level in settings.

LogViewer

Improvements in the Navigator widget

The Navigator widget now has a Favorites Organizer which allows custom ordering of Favorites. It is opened from the Navigator widget settings. It supports drag and drop and you can apply sorting to nodes if you want them in Alphabetical order.

OrganizeFavorites

Lock Screen

A new lock screen feature has been added to the canvas. It can be triggered by Manual lock in the Log Off button or via Automatic lock caused by idle timeouts. The lock screen covers the entire canvas and can be unlocked with the password of the current user. Lock screen timeout can be configured in the Application Settings in Mango Core.

LockScreen

There are also other timeout settings that have been added for automatically closing running programs or even logging off the client. They are all optional and setting the value to 0 turns off the functionality. These settings are useful when you want to prevent the users from leaving Smart Office open, with running programs when leaving the office for the day or when going on vacation.

Timeouts

New variable replacement syntax

The existing variable replacement syntax has been extended with support for variable replacement expressions. This makes it possible to apply functions such as substring and many others to values in variable replacements in Mashups, Smart Links, and other places where variable replacement is supported.

New Sharing Framework

Sharing Smart Office content such as files, text, links, screenshots, and images to a number of different targets, including Infor Ming.le™, a Smart Office contact, and Microsoft Outlook.
With the sharing framework you can share files, text, images and links. This new functionality plays very well with Collaboration and you can create and send files and Smart Office specific content such as a widget or canvas.

shareM3

User language

User language is saved as a roamed setting so that you get your preferred language when logging into a new machine or when multiple users are using different languages on the same machine.

It’s too white

There is a new setting for using a light grey background on the application windows. If you need more contrast you can select a High Contrast Mode (available in 10.1.1). You can also select to have a light grey background, see below. This setting will be added as an enhancement to 10.1.2 as well.

BackgroundSettings

Feature Updates for M3 Applications

New User Personalization settings in MForms

Each type of MForms personalization can now be enabled or disabled by an administrator. With the rules that can be set up it is possible to set different permissions for different users or groups of users. Below is a screenshot of the new settings. All settings that have rules are marked with an asterix next to the browse (…) button.

MformsSettings

Pay extra attention to the Always enable all user personalizations. This is a setting that should not be enabled per default but where you should add a rule and connect all your power users to that role. The setting with overrule any other setting and will allow the user to perform any customization. So this is a way to allow certain users to have access to all personalizations without having to apply rules to each and every setting.

MForms links that starts with underscore

Due to a breaking change in .NET 4.5 involving URIs and Unicode, all MForms URIs where the host part started with an underscore character now work without the underscore character. MForms Automation links that also contain Unicode data should start using URIs. For example, use “mforms://automation” instead of “mforms://_automation”.

Installing Smart Office

If your Grid is still on 10.1.9 you need to upgrade it to 10.1.11. There are some news in the installation from previous versions so I recommend you to read the installation guide.

One of the major news is that there are a few new tools for MangoServer in the grid management pages, see below.

MangoServerManagement

The process of exporting and importing the installation point after signing has been moved from Life Cycle Manager into the grid management pages. The installation point needs to be signed after every framework update. This is done in the new grid management page shown below.

SignInstallationPoint

Other important notes about the standard installation is that Enterprise Search and Infor Lawson Business Intelligence are no longer part of the standard features and need to be installed as a seperate applications in LCM. The StartPad on the other hand has been added as part of the standard features. The reason for this reorganization is that the delivery schedules and the teams responsible for the delivery is different than for the other features. This also enables them to deliver fixes and new versions wihtout a having to plan it together with a Smart Office release.

In this version we move all feature files and installation point files to the database. When upgrading from a previous version (10.1 or higher) all installed features are moved to the database. Only the default feature folder is migrated to the database so if you have used multiple feature folders on the server you need to create them again in the Installation Point Manager Tool. In most cases customers only use the default folder and then you don’t have to do anything.

The reposity will no longer contain previous versions of features. In the repository there can only be one version of a feature. It is not supported to have different versions of feaqtures in different feature folders and now it is no longer possible to make those types of configurations.

If you have modified any file on the file system that is no longer supported and that file will be replaced if you try and manually edit it on disk. Perhaps you have modified the donwload page for Smart Office and added some extra information. That is no longer possible. As of Smart Office 10.2 you can’t change anything on disk since the disk is just a replication of the data that is in the database.

M3 Mashups using the MICombobox

MICombobox now supports an empty row when no selection needs to be made. Set EnableEmptyValue to true for an empty value.

Feature Updates for Lawson Applications

  • In SForms, it is now allowed to enter filter tokens without first entering search text.
  • Share menu item has been added to the Tools menu of List Driven and Standard Forms, Drill Around, and Drill Select.
  • Menu accelerators have been added to all menus not previously enhanced.
  • Condition lists are now available on the Info Browser Conditions tab, the DataPanel mashup control, and the DataTreeView mashup control.

Lawson forms general enhancements

The following enhancements have been made to Lawson forms:

  • In the batch token toolbox, with print files, a new context menu has been expanded to provide all of the same PDF options that are available in the ISO Report Viewer Tools menu.
  • he Attachments maintenance window is now re-sizeable.

Changes to Jobs and Reports

The following enhancements have been made to Jobs and Reports:

  • Job lists now have the personalization option: Select Criteria.
  • A Submit button has been added to the Job Wizard summary panel.

7 thoughts on “Smart Office 10.2”

  1. Heiko

    Hi Karin,

    regarding the “New variable replacement syntax” – is there any documentation in this topic ? Probably it is not suitable to guess how this works 🙂

    /Heiko

  2. karinpb Post author

    Hi,
    If you have the SDK API documentation you can check the ExpressionFunctions class. We will have a new blog post on the topic. Here is a quick preview of what the syntax looks like.

    The functionality was added after a customer requirement to substring a m3 field used in a document link so it can be used in links as well.

    {=Substring('XZ9876', 0, 2)}
{=ToUpper('abc')}
{=ToUpper(GetValue('NAME'))}
{=GetUser()}
{=Concat('https://www.google.com/search?q=', UrlEncode(GetValue('Query')))}

<mashup:Parameter SourceKey="Query" Value="{Binding Path=Text,ElementName=textBoxQuery}" />
<mashup:Parameter SourceKey="Value" Value="{}{=Concat('https://www.google.com/search?q=', UrlEncode(GetValue('Query')))}" />
  3. Jonathan Amiran

    Hi,
    Great new features!

    One thing regarding the Collaboration Server, when installing more than one Mango server on the same host (different Grids of course) you need to change the port (default 8080) to a different port for each grid. Otherwise the grid Router can experience high CPU consumption.

    Jonathan.

    1. karinpb Post author

      Hi Jonathan,
      Yes, the collaboration server must run on different ports or it will not start correctly. This is described in the installation documentation.

    1. karinpb Post author

      Hi,
      It is possible if you are developing your own Mashup constrol but not with standard Mashups. It would be interesting to know more about the scenario. With the Smart Office SDK it should be possible to listen to the window closing event but I’m not sure if it can be cancelled which you would need to do if the window shouldn’t close until the API call is completed. If it is enough just do trigger the API call in the backgorund that would be easier but you still need to write code for it.

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