The next release of Smart Office will include major updates to the Infor Ming.le™ integration in Smart Office for customers with Infor Ming.le Enterprise API and at least Infor Ming.le™ version 11.1.1. Customers that doesn’t meet these requirements will have to make do with what the previous Smart Office release included. The updates include:

• Support for Infor Ming.le™ notifications
• Three new widgets to keep track of what is going on in Infor Ming.le™
• Cross-platform drillbacks that works in both Smart Office and Infor Ming.le™

The Ming.le feature is delivered as a standard feature so no seperate installation is needed. The integration can run in two modes, web and full. The web integration contains the same functionality as previously was delivered as a seperate feature for Smart Office 10.1.1. The full mode requires the Infor Ming.le Enterprise API and will allow a much richer functionality via Widgets and direct sharing.

This blog post contains information about the rich experince you get with the full integration mode.

As the picture above shows, we have added a Infor Ming.le™ icon to the tool bar of Smart Office. Left click this icon to display your latest Infor Ming.le™ notifications or right click to show a context menu from which you can either share a post into Infor Ming.le™ or open the Infor Ming.le™ website.

Infor Ming.le™ Notifications

The notifications view is, as mentioned earlier, accessible via left clicking the Infor Ming.le™ icon in the Smart Office title bar. In this view, the latest notifications are shown and any unread notifications are highlighted with a light blue background color. The number of unread notifications is displayed in the center of the Infor Ming.le™ icon. Clicking on a notification will open the related post if possible.

Smart Office Notifications

When you receive a new Infor Ming.le™ notification, a user setting decides whether to display a notification in the top right corner of the screen or not. This will be shown for a short amount of time and if you click anywhere on this notification, besides the close button, the related post or the notifications view will be shown depending on the content of the notification.

Widgets

Three new widget has been added to support Infor Ming.le™ content in Smart Office.

• My Feed
• Tasks
• Alerts

My Feed Widget

This new widget is a great way of keeping track of what is happening in Infor Ming.le™. As in Infor Ming.le™ web, both posts to social groups you are part of and changes to any followed objects are displayed here as well as any tasks or alerts related to your user. Double clicking any feed in this view will open the related post details in a new window.

Tasks Widget

Two new widgets have been added to support ION Alerts and Tasks in Smart Office. There are two things the user can do to customize the content of these widgets: the first is to filter items, which is done via the button on the bottom left side; and the other is to choose how to group the items, which is accessible via the context menu of the widget. The filtering option simply filters out items that haven’t escalated, while the grouping option lets the user group the items based on either date or assignee.

The image above shows the Tasks widget with its related tooltip. Filter is not set and the grouping is set to date. The tooltip shows that this task is assigned to me (via the icon in the bottom left corner) and that is hasn’t been escalated (via the icon in the bottom right corner).

Alerts Widget

The image below shows the Alerts widget with its related tooltip. Filter is set and the grouping is set to assignee. Notice the counter at the top that displays the total number of Alerts associated with your user. This number does not take filtering or grouping into consideration.

If you right click an item in the Alerts or Tasks widgets, a context menu containing the following options will appear:

• Open – Shows a details view for the related item
• Unassign – Visible if the item is assigned to the current user, simply removes the user as assignee.
• Assign to me – Visible if the item is not assigned to the current user, simply adds the user as assignee.
• Assign – Shows an expanded menu where the user can choose a user to assign the item to.
• Done – Only visible for alerts, marks the item as done which leads to that the alert is completed in Infor Ming.le™ and also removed from the widget.

Detail Views

Three types of detail views was created to support the new widgets. All of these views are quite similar in both layout and functionality but for they correlate to different Infor Ming.le™ data types.

Feed Details

An example of a details view for a standard social Infor Ming.le™ post can be seen image below. You can see that both web addresses as well as links to MForms is highlighted as hyperlinks in the text. Commenting on a post is done as you would expect via the text field at the bottom of the window.

Task Details

As in the case with the widgets, the detail views of Alerts and Tasks are more or less the same in Smart Office. The image below shows an example of a details view for Task 424.

This view contains the following:

1. The first row contains of an image showing that this is a task, the message of the task and the date the task was created.
2. The second row contains the parameters of the task (if there are any). Most of the time only one or a few text boxes can be edited.
3. The third row contains attachments of the task (if there are any).
4. The fourth row contains two different types of controls
   1. Drillbacks related to the task, the possibility to add attachments and the possibility to share this task in Infor Ming.le™
   2. The possibility to unassign/assign to me (depending on the status of the task), the possibility to assign to another user and finally the Done-button which marks the task as completed.
5. The last row is dedicated to notes related to the task. These can either be written by users or generated by Infor Ming.le™.

Alert Details

The alert view is more or less the same but with two main differences. The first is that the icon shows that this is an alert and the second is that alerts have attributes instead of parameters. The attributes is not editable.

This image also shows how the escalation level is shown if the task or alert is escalated and it also shows the social object button menu which appears if the item has related social objects. These objects can be followed / un-followed via the button in the menu.

Share Dialog

This new dialog supports all sharing functionality that is available in Infor Ming.le™, i.e. mention a person or group, add links and drillbacks, attachments and setting target for the post. A bonus feature compared to the web client is that you can very easily add a snapshot of the screen via the Add Screenshot button.

Sharing Smart Office Content

So far all of the new features presented are more or less for consuming Infor Ming.le™ content, so how do you share relevant Smart Office content to Infor Ming.le™?

From an M3 Application

A Infor Ming.le™ icon has been added to all M3 applications that lets you share a drillback to the current page of the application via the share dialog. These drillbacks do of course work in both the Infor Ming.le™ web environment as well as in Smart Office. This functionality is also available via the Tools menu in the M3 applications.

Smart Office Share

It is also possible to share screenshots, links and bookmarks via the new Smart Office share functionality. This also triggers the share dialog to open with the chosen data to share.

Authentication

There are two ways of authenticating a user towards Infor Ming.le™ from Smart Office. The first is via Active Directory Federation Service, ADFS, and the other is via setting manual keys which can be provided from your Infor Ming.le™ administrator.

Settings

There are a few settings available in Smart Office to control the integration.

Application Settings

There are five application settings in this version of the Infor Ming.le™ integration. These are:

• Enable Ming.le – Checkbox that enables the Infor Ming.le™ integration
• Mode – Full or Web, specifies if the users should have full access to the integration or be restricted to using the website
• Notification refresh interval (seconds) – How often the notifications view should check for new notifications
• Request timeout (seconds) – Specifies how long a API call should run before it times out
• Retry count – How many times the service should try to authenticate itself

User Settings

There are a few settings which the users themselves can set (if the administrator allows it).

• Alert me of new notifications – Checkbox that determines whether to show Smart Office notifications or not when a new Infor Ming.le™ notification is received.
• Refresh time – Sets the interval of which the three new widgets should check for new data. The choices span from ‘Do not refresh’ to ’60 minutes’.
• Authentication mode – Manual or ADFS

If manual is chosen the user have to specify values for User GUID, Activation key and Secret key which, as mentioned eralier, can be retrived by your Infor Ming.le™ administrator.