Anyone on browser-only Kinetic 2024.1?

I did too Jason.

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Seems to be that way.

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Ah yes, this is apparently fixed in 2024 though so that’s good. This is one of the main reasons I am trying to upgrade. I have received so many emails where they can’t even launch end activity and so they can’t clock out of anything. Other times it is job entry/tracker, or quote entry, or receipt entry or shipment entry… all critical to doing business.

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Yeah… they load… just not with your layers until you hit the refresh button. :rofl:

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Short memories:

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Small world. Those are the same ones we had glitches with…entry/tracker for sales order, job, quote, shipment. Didn’t have issues that I recall with receipt or PO entry.

The “universal workaround” came from our consultants and has worked OK when we needed it…sometimes it took one try, sometimes 3-4. Haven’t had it pop up in a while so I guess it’ll happen today. Say its name and it appears.

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In case it helps and you want to explore… do you have a customized layer in MES that may be impacting the End Activity events?

Epicor modified the “LaunchPDFFormTemplateView” events as described in my initial case filing, but I had initially thought they had forgotten the first condition in their redesign of that event. But what I found was that they ALSO modified the EndActivity button click event

2023.2
image

2024.1
image

The condition in the new 2024.1 MESControl.EndActivity is the same condition that USED to be in the LaunchPDFFormTemplateView event.

Because I was using a custom event it did not contain the “moved” condition.

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Mark, the classic line I hear from management is “it worked for 15+ years and could have worked for 15+ more.”

They get to choose the strategy of their company, and I really don’t feel strongly enough other than for cybersecurity and infrastructure concerns arguing much against that strategy.

They don’t need .NET 8, they haven’t for the last 15 years. They don’t need SQL, they haven’t for the past 15 years, they don’t need APIs, they haven’t for the past 15 years.

Look, you and I know these technologies can help grow companies and that’s another arguable point, but at the end of the day, in my own very limited experience with business owners/management I have worked for, core functionality is the most important thing to them before any theoretical gains that these new technologies have.

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These screens aren’t customized, at least most of them.

It’s from two people launching the form at the exact same time and locking up a cache file that gets written to the server.

Here’s our thread on it:

Order Entry screen showing {{strings.XXXX}} in stead of field names - Kinetic ERP - Epicor User Help Forum (epiusers.help)

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What are you responding to here? I ask because if you’re telling me it’s fixed, but this is the new experience I am a little worried about that.

All the horses need to be pulling the cart at the same time in the same direction if the cart’s going to be moved along.

Functionality. Performance. Security. Reliability. Can’t sacrifice one for another.

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I was responding to your comment that your users can’t “launch end activity”.

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I know, I know. We don’t tell them how to build tools, design product, development sales strategies, but they feel completely intellectually prepared to make business system decisions and the vast majority are not. Don’t even mention data security practices…

OTOH, pretending the world is static - for 15 years or more - is a sure-fire way to let some eager startup eat your business. They’re probably complaining that they can’t find a Blockbuster Video anymore…I mean, DVDs were great for 15 years and could have worked 15 more. :person_facepalming:

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I’m with you also.

The internal decision to go Kinetic is hard. Users are at least resigned to the fact that NEW software will have a painful transition, but they have much less patience when you’re just UPGRADING the same stuff they’ve been using. AND some of the under-the-hood stuff we use is still settling out.

Is a partial movement to Kinetic a viable option? Maybe, maybe not. I’m a part of a lot of these decisions, and there are just too many variables to say what should “generally” be done. The day is indeed coming when the decision will be forced but that day isn’t here yet.

Just keep trying to be as ready as you can be (in all your spare time, of course).

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Haha Mark I love it!

Nah that’s just it though, we are here to voice the benefits of new tech and make sure they don’t get their lunch eaten, but at the end of the day, most of the time (in my limited experience), the management I have worked for choose core functionality over risking stability for new tech trends. It’s all a balance though, cause yeah no one wants to be blockbuster or Kodak.

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Ernie you perfectly summed up the decision. It’s so hard with seemingly no “right” way to do it.

The thing that kills me is that if you go on the mixed mode implementation, when do you rip the band aid?

And at the same time a full browser or full kinetic implementation brings some screens and departments to their knees with degraded functionality and/or bugs at no gain to them except for now they are more “kinetic ready.”

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While I have been actively contributing to what an AI model would probably categorize as a “negative sentiment” type thread, I truly am looking forward to the first stable version of kinetic and kinetic forms. It will be an incredible day just as every past version has had. We need to keep being constructive about the pains we are experiencing and submitting tickets as @aosemwengie1 has said. Otherwise nothing gets fixed or they don’t know about it. It’s getting better and better, the time will come when they have it honed in.

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Very true Utah. Also, I don’t want to lead anyone to believe that changing technology for technology sake is a good business practice. It’s not. We are here to support the business. When we look at the technology that has been running the business, we also have to address the infrastructure used to implement it. Microsoft has no official support for WinForms outside of an Open Source project. It’s still not fully supported in the new .NET core. The underlying Framework can change and break things. A Windows update earlier this year caused BSOD in WinForms. These are the things that non-technical leaders don’t consider, and it’s our job to inform them of the trade-offs with our technological decisions.

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Not yet for us.

Appreciate the speed and some of the new added features in Kinetic but it feels like User Experience wasn’t fully taken into account.

Information that was previously easily accessible now needs additional clicks to reach.

It’ll be a slow transition over unless Epicor all of a sudden decide to remove classic tomorrow.

For YEARS at user groups we kept hearing the importance of moving to Kinetic (e.g. faster, more tools, updates to classic are done, Kinetic screens will have fields not available on Classic, etc). At the beginning, in mid 2022, we were warned by other users about the App Studio mess in 2022.1, so we waited patiently. We again were warned by users at the users group about similar issues in 2022.2, but were told that by 2023.1 App Studio issues would be worked out, so we targeted 2023.1.

We spent months testing, finding bugs, making cases, waiting for updates, then had a handful of hard stops (told to wait for 2023.2). We scratched the upgrade to 2023.1, waited, installed 2023.2 and started the process all over. During that UAT testing process new issues were discovered, again more hard-stops. We created more cases, waited for new dot releases, then started being told that some of those issues would be fixed in 2024.1, great.

Scrapped 2023.2, targeted 2024.1. Our discovered hard stops were resolved, App Studio seemed ready for primetime, our staff had some annoyances, but the system seemed stable. The UAT team was exhausted from the well-over 18 month upgrade process, so we decided to go live (the UAT team is a group of non-technical staff members that lead their area. They do their best to troubleshoot issues, but testing is done on top of their normal daily tasks).

We targeted browser-only because it was championed constantly from Epicor at user groups, seemed like a WAY better option than running both classic/kinetic in mixed mode, and thought the updates would be minor to smooth out the issues.

Now, with the many cases we’ve reported, we’re starting to get the “you’ll need to upgrade to 2024.2” message. I honestly think Epicor should kill this upgrade cadence and just stick with “non breaking” dot releases for about 2 years.

Through this process we’ve had many calls/emails with our CAM and multiple meetings with higher-up VPs. The first was during our testing of 2023.1 and 2023.2 issues. We were promised direct attention and escalation of our cases, yet each time I was at ground zero with a new tech person, going through the basic motions for each issue.

At one point our layers from 2023.1 wouldn’t import into 2024.1. All that work for nothing, so it seemed. After weeks of back and forth the case went nowhere, as they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with our layers. In the end, I had a hunch: Reinstall 2023.2, upgrade layers from 2023.1 to 2023.2, export, then import to 2024.1. That worked, and probably makes sense now that I look back, but man that was a frustrating few weeks.

The hardest part with the challenges is that I generally believe in the tech stack direction of Epicor and that the bulk of the system works fine. The issues we have, however, gut confidence and satisfaction. If I even mention that we need to target 2024.2 to fix some things…

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