Epicor FTP retiring

Kinetic ERP
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I received a notice from Epicor that they are retiring our FTP folder by Jan 15.

Very kind of them to send it when the company was closed for New Years Day.

Anyway this will affect us a lot as there is a fair amount of FTP automation that we use that folder for. 2 weeks is not acceptable.
Is anyone else running into issues with that.

Also the script they sent does not work…

Is it just me or does Epicor support just another way to say malicious non compliance.

Between Classic Sunset, Linux Containers and now this it seems like they LOVE making their customers do lots of work for not our benefit.

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I’m wondering if the timeline acerated to retire the FTP service after the recent security issues they had. Not saying that justifies only giving customers 13 days to migrate to Azure File Shares. But, may be what triggered the rapid move.

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FTP has been losing steam as a secure transfer for a long time now. Others were cut off without warning discussed here on the group:

So, technically, this has been longer than two weeks. The industry has been moving away from FTP even longer. The ftp:// was removed from Chrome in 2021. So, if anything, Epicor is late to the game, and I might even call this “malicious compliance.” :person_shrugging:

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Technically it takes a minute to call your valued customer who pays you a lot for a support plan and tell them, hey we are getting rid of this feature in 6 months.

But instead send out an email once it was realized that they forgot to tell the customers again.

Next time we have a meeting with our CAM I will be bringing up -value- for service.

I cannot imagine what companies without IT people would do. This could have been handled way better.

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Unfortunately Epicor struggles to send emails out with the correct content and to the correct customer lists. They missed sending an email about a Quick Ship carrier change to on-prem customers. I opened a ticket to ask why we didn’t get it. A week or so later they realized they forgot about us on-prem folks.

They also messed up sending notifications out about Automation Studio. They just completely missed some customers in multiple emails. I know some of the mods on here have talked to Epicor about the email issues. Hopefully it gets better.

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What! No more clear text passwords.. Damn… What to do?

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Yup did not get an email about it until after hours (10:44PM) New Years Eve. Unacceptable.

To add joy to the announcement I tried the new AZ share folder using BAQ Export screen.

It does -not- work it gives an error message requesting a user name or password.
There is no spot for this.

Similar results in the Kinetic form but even less helpful. Just gives a something went wrong error.

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Unless Microsoft changed it - Azure File Share doesn’t allow anonymous write access. The only anonymous access that’s configurable is read. So not sure the BAQ export process is going to be able to write to that. There’s no way to provide creds in that export process.

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I have a BAQ that exports a file to our azure share. IIRC I think support had to run this on our app server (we’re SaaS) so the app server would be logged in.

I also don’t write to the IP it’s: \\ausdt*****\SiteID...*

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That makes more sense. They have to add the storage key or Azure RBAC creds somewhere. @tpynepeak probably need to open a ticket and get them to add those creds wherever they need to be entered by Epicor support.

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This is great advice, thank you! I have a call with them today.

That being said Epicor opened the case for the FTP transition to Azure when they gave us the 15 days notice.
So why they did not do that then I have no idea.

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Comedy No One Will Know GIF by CBC

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Are you guys SaaS or on-prem? If on-prem you guys manage your own app server(s) not Epicor.

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I think they are SaaS.

15

Hi

We are cloud customers.

Turns out they had to set up the Bartender Pipeline on their end.
Once they did I could write to the folder from functions and also update the report location to point to it in Report Styles - before it would error out if we tried to use that location. (Nice quick test - it will tell you right in styles)

// Sample function code that I wrote to test if I could write files once I set up the drive to access the fileshare**

// Live is a subfolder that we added to the main share folder
var filePath = `@"\\{company#}.file.core.windows.net\{company#}\Live\Testing.txt";`

System.IO.StreamWriter sw = new System.IO.StreamWriter(filePath);
sw.WriteLine("Some crazy text");
      
sw.Close();
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That’s likely to stop working. Here is a direct translation to Sandbox.
There are other ways, depending on what you want to do.

ISandbox sb = Sandbox;

var filePath = new FilePath(ServerFolder.CompanyData, "Live/Testing.txt");

using(var fs = sb.IO.File.OpenWrite(filePath))
{
    using (System.IO.StreamWriter sw = new System.IO.StreamWriter(fs, System.Text.Encoding.UTF8))
    {
        sw.WriteLine("Some crazy text");
    }
};
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I did some investigation, and found that a few customers were looking to move off of FTP to Azure File Share for a more secure way of transferring files. Our support team sent a communication that changes were coming, indicating FTP was “going away”. This was not a retirement message, and Epicor did not send this note out - it was specific to case tickets and work being done with those 3 customers.

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Excellent.

It was a bit different for us, I did not request to retire our FTP processes.

I got a case assigned to my company by Epicor, New Years Eve about an hour before midnight stating that FTP was retiring.

Hence my concern :slight_smile:

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Epicor requested it for you :sweat_smile:

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I just found out from my CAM that the FTP folders we use are not being retired. So people getting notifications about their FTP folders must be on a case by case basis. At least that is how I am understanding it.

Thanks so much! Will let you know if this ever changes for us.

Happy New Year!

Jill

1 Like