In my experience so far, this has not really helped very much in terms of reducing the upgrade effort. The kinetic screens are so wildly different from classic that its like learning a new program for the users. This changes the kinds of customizations that they want. I have not found that I am able to just upgrade any existing classic customizations to kinetic, its basically just starting from scratch with discovery. Just my experience.
On this basis we are not developing anything in classic anymore, period. If we need it, then we need to do it in kinetic.
Taking this approach means your feedback won’t be part of what Epicor considers as kinetic evolves. I feel there is an advantage to adopt where it makes sense earlier than later, and be able to contribute feedback that will help shape the direction and usability to some extent (through tickets and Ideas). Kinetic has been changing extremely fast over the last couple of years. For all my complaining, its unquestionably going to be better in the long run. I think over time that evolution will slow down just like E10 did and your opportunity for influence will diminish. Maybe that isn’t important to you but we are all just throwing thoughts out there right?
To be clear, I think both @Banderson and I were focusing on the (always) poor practice of putting business logic in the classic screens instead of the server. For those customizations that were “easier” to do that way, payment is now due. If you do it now, you won’t have to do it later. That’s the part that will be easier. Yes, of course, moving from the .NET model to the web will be the same mind-bending change and will take practice to get back to the same competency we were before.
That is MY approach I’m not saying everyone needs to have that same approach. Dabbling is good, and required for progress, but not at the expense of your business. There is balance.
We did an official announcement at Insights 2023 2024, as well as at multiple user group meetings. Here are two of the slides from the deck that we presented. These two slides were in several different presentations at Insights.
The first slide talks about how we are continuing classic UX Support beyond 2024.1.
The second slide is where we talk about the “Classic and Modern” home pages being deprecated in 2024.1.
They can’t simply get rid of Classic screens, as it is always the fallback for Support “Does it work in Classic?” Kinetic is just not as robust still in many places to rely on every feature, but is getting better. I agree that any new or important Classic or Modern customization should be done in Kinetic, though difficult to do… “This is the Way”
We simply have no choice and Cloud makes it even harder. I.E. Kinetic MES Trainwreck, is just one post and example. But they are working hard on it and Tim is leading a massive charge to get it right, so I have no doubts that great things are ahead for everyone in the new release from what I have seen already. Just those typical annoyances that were there even in Classic would be nice to see someday soon eliminated.
Put the effort into Kinetic, and you will be better off in the short and long run.
My 2 cents anyway, lol
Interesting, so there is no actual document where this is published? Is that the plan as future classic screens are phased out? Its just challenging because if you want to look somewhere on Epicweb and confirm what was announced to be phased out, there isn’t really anything to refer back to. To my mind an official announcement would include some kind of referencable document. Another example, the classic system monitor was removed in 2023.2. Yes you can still pop it from the system tray but its not on the menu nor is it POSSIBLE to put it back on the menu. It seems like some kind of announcement would be warranted but I can’t find anything about it anywhere other than my support cases.
I am as frustrated with Support as anyone, especially as I was a telephone support rep for MANY years (admittedly 30-odd years ago)… but one of the things they have to know is is this a UX issue or is it a deeper issue? The answer will tell them where to go next.
Is this line overused? Probably… but before I call Support now I always check first to see if the problem I’m about to enter replicates in both environments.
Agreed. This is a perfectly legitimate troubleshooting technique. The two different UI’s share some of the same code. So if it happens in both, you know it’s server code, if it’s only a problem in one, then it’s that UI branches issue. By doing this, you’ve effectively cut the area to look for the problem into 3rds.
Well sure but you can’t actually control whether you are launching classic or kinetic from the menu on an individual level, so its actually really hard and time consuming to perform this testing. It would be nbd if WHEN I click the shortcut, I can “open with” kinetic or classic. But I can’t. If it launches in classic with the toast, ok I can test classic.
If I’ve got that menu switched to kinetic already, I have to literally create an entire new menu item. Then close. Then log back in. All just to run the classic program.
Or if I just have my user preferences set to kinetic, I have to go change my user preferences for the entire application. Close. Relaunch. Just to get to classic.
This is not fair or reasonable. So to sum it up, make it EASY to pick which one to run or else support should do it themselves not make me modify my menu or preferences to test their bugs.
yes! At least add the option if you’ve got Developer Mode turned on - Have a slider to select Classic or Kinetic. Similar to having a checkbox to select Base.
Didn’t @timshuwy say this quick-change feature was coming back in 2024.1.x?
Can’t find it, but could swear that was something he mentioned [Safe Harbor and all still applies]
Ah, yeah that can be pain. We’re just set up client is all classic, and if you want kinetic, you go to the browser. But if are running kinetic screens from the client, I can see this being a pain.
So… just to be clear… we did not deprecate the smart client screens. You still have the choice to run the smart client screens, EVEN WHEN running from a browser (with Browser First mode in 2023.2). You have the option in the menu to force the app to run the smart client version.
But also note, that in the slides I provided above, we stated that we are not doing any updates to the smart client. New features that are added, including new fields, new functionality, etc, are only being done in the Browser version. The browser version is the future for the software…AND the browser version is much faster when running from the browser (Google Chrome/Microsoft edge).
SPEED: Just today, I was demonstrating running Kinetic from a browser (in the cloud). I launched kinetic, logged in, launched Buyer Workbench, and was all the way to the screen in about 10 seconds… how long does this take in the smart client for you?
You can decide if classic or kinetic opens by holding down Alt when opening a menu item, this then opens a preference menu for that menu item and can choose classic or kinetic. The next time the menu item is clicked it will honor your preference. No need to create new menus
