Sharing Kinetic Application Help

Kinetic ERP
,
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I would like to be able to share links to the application help topics with our users via email or some other communication, without requiring them to start Kinetic and find the article in the Help menu.

When I attempt to do this, I get a page telling me to access Epicor documentation from the Help Menu.

The instructions are clear, but this is very inconvenient.

I’ve resorted to copy/pasting help articles to Word and saving as PDF to be shared later, but this doesn’t scale well…

Has anyone found a way around this? I suppose that if you have, maybe you shouldn’t admit to it… :slight_smile:

2 Likes
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I’ve used screenshots. Same concept as your copy+pasta. :woman_shrugging:t2:

1 Like
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This drives me crazy too. I’ve provided the feedback to the Epicor people who are in charge of the documentation per their request but nothing seems to be done about it. This is a massive loss in functionality and makes a lot more unnecessary work for sys admins since we can no longer point people to exactly the info they need.

2 Likes
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I think I have the magic sauce.

Give me a minute.

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I’ve encountered resistance → authentication done → I’ve encountered nasty javascript now
Disgusted Fart GIF by Gogglebox Australia

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happy star wars GIF

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The input provided by you and many other users in the Epicor Learning thread resulted in over 20 additional ideas submitted to the Epicor Learning Center workspace. All of those are actively gauging interest with customers and some are already being sized by development for future release opportunities. Please follow the ideas to stay up to date on their progress and continue to engage with us via the comments after you have voted.

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Is there an idea out there for this issue?

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@andrew.johnson - With IDP you can share links to help articles and guides today. The Epicor Learning team is actively looking into other solutions to help with knowledge sharing. Please take a look at some of the ideas submitted in the Epicor Learning Center workspace in Epicor Ideas to participate and share you interest.

1 Like
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@moderators - Can you please remove the link in the above response for “Epicor Ideas” this is linking to another post and that was not the intention.

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It’s a global tag. Gotta make a specific link.

Edit: He fixed it.

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I removed that “feature” Hopefully everyone understands that whining about Ideas is not useful.

1 Like
13

I have now.

I need a bit to think how best to utilize it.

14

Star Wars GIF

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Well actually the Epicor Ideas Committee is actively reevaluating the current setup of Epicor Ideas to promote more participate within the portals, more to come on that soon!

2 Likes
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Careful…

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Great to hear @karihagedorn, we have Quick Ship and a few other modules, it’s hard to get much traction on those subs as fewer clients are on them compared to the whole Kinetic user base.

1 Like
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Ok, I’ll share what I have learned.

When you click a help link in the Kinetic Web UI, it calls:

Ice.LIB.ClientFunctionsSvc/ProcessZDHelpTopicOrLabel

It has a payload similar to the following:

{
  "label": "",
  "helpTopic": "https://kinetichelp222.epicor.com/hc/en-us/articles/9682928523661-Understanding-Kinetic-Home-Page",
  "userName": "ErpUser 112200",
  "userEmail": "erp_donotreply112200@epicor.com",
  "aryTags": [
    "erp112200"
  ],
  "zdSubDomain": "erphelp112200",
  "locale": "en-US"
}

That returns an object with an url like so:

{"returnObj":"https://erchelp.zendesk.com/access/jwt?jwt=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpYXQiOjE2ODAyMDc2NjYsImp0aSI6IjRlMmI5OGNmLTEwZmQtNGQ0MS1iMDVmLWM5YzRkMDcwZGM1MyIsInRhZ3MiOlsiZXJwMTEyMjAwIl0sIm5hbWUiOiJFcnBVc2VyIDExMjIwMCIsImVtYWlsIjoiZXJwX2Rvbm90cmVwbHkxMTIyMDBAZXBpY29yLmNvbSJ9.J45wu9HID4WlZqLaujGmsAi7uHeoC1fytmNWMQTQXnQ&return_to=https%3a%2f%2fkinetichelp222.epicor.com%2fhc%2fen-us%2farticles%2f9682928523661-Understanding-Kinetic-Home-Page"}

All that gobbledy-gook is a Json Web Token & url for Zendesk.

That url is valid for 3 minutes, and can’t be reused.

The structure of that Base64 Gobbledy -Gook is:

//Header
{
  "alg": "HS256",
  "typ": "JWT"
}

//Payload
{
  "iat": 1680203096,
  "jti": "135a7c63-2f40-43b9-b3aa-91aaefb75b0b",
  "tags": [
    "erp112200"
  ],
  "name": "ErpUser 112200",
  "email": "erp_donotreply112200@epicor.com"
}

And the part after the second dot is part of the secret sauce that we do not have, otherwise we could
just generate our own.

Of course that really doesn’t matter much anyway. Either way, we need some kind of man in the middle.
If you want to make it work, you need to pass that url link:
https://kinetichelp222.epicor.com/hc/en-us/articles/9682928523661-Understanding-Kinetic-Home-Page

to a service that passes it to that business object with those parameters, and it will spit you out a real link that will work (for 3 minutes lol)

So if you really wanted to do it, make up a minimal api in c#, or an express app in node.js,
that takes an url like:

https://myserver/getepicorhelpurl?https%3A%2F%2Fkinetichelp222.epicor.com%2Fhc%2Fen-us%2Farticles%2F9682928523661-Understanding-Kinetic-Home-Page

and return a redirect to the real one you get from the service.

I didn’t say it would be fun, I said it could be done.

19

Kermit GIF

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I’m dying. :rofl::rofl::rofl: