Information Worker and Course

Epicor ERP 10
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Has anyone here taken the Information Worker course? I am so frustrated with this thing and I am hoping it’s just me being a bonehead.

I have one of the lastest education db’s 10.2.200.20 (and matching appserver/infoworker deployment)

Issue number one, I couldnt even get BAQs to list in the IW console. After wasting much time, I found there were about 4 errant BAQ’s (included in the DB) that were causing the issue. (Complained about an ID column not being unique)

Once that was complete, I tried following the course again and ran into additional issues.

During creation of the Business Entity, it says I should select PrimaryKey = LobID, this is not an option. Also, it says I should select Sync Filter Column = LobVersion, which is also not an option.

Have I overlooked something?

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Hi @Chris_Conn,

How did you resolve the error’s with the system BAQ’s?
I am setting up information worker for my company at the moment and getting the same error
"Column ‘Id’ is constrained to be unique. Value ‘ASIA-impart’ is already present.

Interestingly the LobID and LobVersion are available in the drop down for me - this is in version 10.2.200.16

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I gave up - which is unfortunate since it is a requirement for my level 2 tools certification…

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If I get a spare moment I should give that a crack…Not sure if we have an IW licence to test with though.

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5

I wonder if it can be used with the demo database? (Assuming it can be used at all haha)

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I’ll keep you all posted…Might be some good Easter fun :slight_smile: …(note to self add to list)

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Being the intrusive SOB that information worker is. I will have to setup some Office components on my VM and test it from there. Stay tuned over the next few weeks. :slight_smile:

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(im)patiently waiting :stuck_out_tongue:

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All I have installed IW on 10.2.300.14, I had never installed it to the appserver before so I had to install it. Interestingly the Update information marks is as one of those entension applications that does NOT require re-installation after an update.

I performed the installation with no issues and installed Office 2016 on the server and installed the IW client. With no issue. I even imported some customers into outlook.

I have gone through both the IW Course and the IW Administation course, and apart from an object reference error when trying to add parameters I had no problems. There were a few steps where the documentation was a bit out of step, but overall it worked. Including the LobID and LobVersion fields.

@Chris_Conn when you did your install did you run it as admin? Did you open up the Admin Console when you deployed IW as run as admin also? My advice is clean out your demo database, redeploy IW and try again.

I’m actually keen to demo this to our Sales Manager, as I can see an instant win for our team on the road…So @Chris_Conn thanks again for asking the question, and @Jordan.oh for prompting me to look at this in more detail, I am delighted in the improvements since I tried my first IW install all the way back in 2013 with E9.

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While this course is required for some certification, what do you gentlemen (and @Chris_Conn) think the future of this technology will be? The concept was new in 2008 but I wonder if RESTful services and Progressive Web Applications might render this framework obsolete as it doesn’t work with O365, at least the Cloud version. Epicor’s IW is version dependent for both Office and Epicor, correct?

Just curious…

Oh, our users did NOT like the added startup time while IW loaded…

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Although I havent been able to use it yet, I have some initial feelings (perhaps premature):

  • It seems invasive to always have it loaded in memory.
  • It slows down the startup of all office products
  • Like you mention, with REST now, getting to the Epicor data is pretty straightforward now.
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No doubt it the connectivity to the Epicor app server will change, some day.

As for slowing down MS Office, I agree, BUT, for a small sacrifice it can get you up and running, in particular for your sales team that are still in 2008 (maybe even earlier) and live in email. I shockingly discovered the other day that they email a summary of their site visits to our receptionist who copies an pastes them to create a report!

So ANY improvement and getting CRM Calls into Epicor in one hit, for perusal by management would be a benefit. IW does this in a fairly easy way, and the training is simple. While I’d love to have our sales team living in Epicor and Phocas, I can’t see that happening in the near future. Hopefully this will give them a taste of what can be done without a heap of work on the IT side of things, and without dramatically altering the way that they work today.

I was actually thinking of getting our IT team to investigate the use of Dragon dictate for the people on the road to help them even more, but even that might be a step too far.

I know you could go the Salesforce route and do integration and have the Sales team use SF on their phone, but there goes another subscription licence. All of these subscriptions add up, and you have to be realistic at some stage.

So while the technology is a bit long in the tooth, it appears to work and allows users to do stuff in Outlook without having to open anything else.

If you are an O365 subscriber you still get to install Oultook on your PC/Notebook, Windows Tablet, and that’s how our sales team do it The day that MS goes totally cloud for O365 then that will be the end of IW in its current form, I suppose.

How cool would it be if it could integrate as a plugin, not only for Outlook.com, but for Gsuite/Gmail as well?

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Completely agree with you @Hally. This would be the quickest way to get CRM info into Epicor. It does come with some “structural debt” as I don’t see Microsoft nor Epicor do much more with it.

CRM is a tough thing as Rob mentioned in another thread. What is important? Access to all customer info? Even offline? Even IW limits the history to a certain amount. This sync capability comes with a development cost and I see that being replaced with Progressive Web Apps where a web worker can determine the current connectivity situation and dynamically try to cache items. As far as these kinds of integrations go, I’m a fan of a windowing version where a “view” of the related record is shown instead of syncing records like the old Palm Pilot. This web-view approach will work well with O365. I’m not as familiar with the G-Suite development environment but it may be doable there as well. (Personally, I don’t see the mystique in SF. They’ve done a nice job with their platform but it’s VERY expensive for most Epicor-sized companies. IMHO.)

Mark W.

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I agree wholeheartedly, it becomes a tough nut to swallow after investing a lot of time and money into just the Epicor side.

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I did here someone mention that there was something going on with IW and O365, but I might have just not been listening hard enough, it might be just rumour. Perhaps there will be something at Insights about it.

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It would certainly be the right time to say something about the future of IW so those of who do use it now (albeit hate it most days) can have some HOPE of a better world without having to write our own app…