NUGM 2024: A Real Live User Group Meeting!

NovoROISystems' first in-person post-covid user group meeting came off without a hitch. 

 An intimate group of about 20 customers participated, some bringing experience in search of new ideas, others bringing novel points of view and a hunger for experienced perspectives. 

Bud Brown brought his deep well of system administration knowledge. 

Linda McHenry and I shared our custom and standard development experience. I took a deep dive into Manage 2000 as a REST consumer and also as a REST provider.  Linda pulled back the curtain on creating and modifying Manage 2000 web functions.

Marc and Trey and Joanne covered NovoROISystems software as well as several standard Manage 2000 topics. 

And special guest, Ian Foster, brought an introduction to Embrace ERP, which is a going and growing concern with an APICS core similar to Manage 2000.

It was short but sweet.

Really heart warming to see old friends still succeeding in manufacturing using Manage 2000 as a rock solid ERP solution.

And encouraging to see new faces just beginning their journey with Manage 2000 or in some cases experienced Manage 2000 6.5 users looking into the face of the Manage 2000 8.1 world.

Frodo Lives!

Manage 2000 News Ideas

Manage 2000 NEWS.ARTICLES provide a wrapper for ERP generated news content, publishing ERP news on an RSS feed making it accessible from any RSS enabled client.  This might be the Manage 2000 web function NewsReader, or a web browser RSS plug-in, or some other client newsreader software outside of Manage 2000.

Many news content providers already exist within Manage 2000. MSO is one out of 8 news source types available in NEWS.ARTICLES. The MSO new source type publishes the results of Manage 2000 Software Objects.  There are about 1000 standard MSOs, about 1/2 of which are suitable for publishing as news articles (not dependent on PWS).  And if you don't see what you are looking for, creating specific new tailored MSOs can be quickly accomplished using MSO.BUILD.

News About a Customer:

There are lots of standard MSOs creating content about customers and sales.  You can easily configure a newsfeed focused on what has just happened in a customer's account and another feed focused on what is expected to happen shortly.  You can copy any of these standard MSOs to a tailored version to adjust date ranges, time spans, and other options.

Try creating a Customer Recent Events newsfeed with news articles based on some of these MSOs: 508S, 509S, 512S, 513S, 514S.  And a Customer Forecast News with news articles based on some of these MSOs: 510S, 515S, 1272S, 1278S.

In NEWS.ARTICLES select MSO as the Source and enter the MSO Id and then accept all the defaults.

Add your articles to a newsfeed and then inspect in the NewsReader.

When you have something you like then use the previous post 'Virtual NUGM 2023 Tailoring Manage 2000 Web Portals' to guide you through adding your displays to LOOK.AR.

News About Today's Business Activity:

If SOP.CONSTANTS Sales Data Monitoring and AR.CONSTANTS AR Data Monitoring are enabled then MCD_DATA is updated with monitoring information about Sales Orders and Shipments and Invoicing and Cash Receipts as these transactions are entered into Manage 2000. 

MCD_DATA can be used as a News Source in NEWS.ARTICLES to present live information about SOP/AR activity.  You can present bottom line totals or Top Ten lists of customers or parts or sales reps, which continuously update as transactions are entered into the ERP system.

News From The Shipping/Receiving Docks:

Create an E type MSO which lists the RCVNG.RPTS for today in reverse chronological order  sampling the last hour or so.  Then wrap your tailored MSO in a NEWS.ARTICLE.

News From The Production Floor :

If you track live activity on your production floor using an MES system then check to see if it is capable of publishing REST services providing detailed status of work in progress.  If so you can configure a REST.SERVICE in Manage 2000 to consume the MES REST service.  And yes, there is a REST news source type allowing you to publish the MES information inside of Manage 2000, say, on the Work Order Status portal.

News About System Administration Tasks:

Another of the 8 news source types is MONITOR.  You can publish MONITOR.OPTIONS of ADI, BATCH.MASTER, CASE, ECA Agents, MASTER.AGENT processes and more. The original MONITOR.INTERFACE was PWS based, consuming a PWS user license while providing a user display. NEWS.ARICLES publishing MONITOR.OPTIONS are displayed in a web browser drastically lowering the license cost of using MONITOR.OPTIONS and making them available on a variety of devices.

News From Power BI:

If your company uses Power BI to build Visualizations you can publish these as news articles making them available to Manage 2000 users within the ERP system.

In Summary:

Manage 2000 RSS News is a low cost way of sharing ERP news events in real time. You can leave newsfeeds for private consumption by users in NewsReader, or make the newsfeed appear on portal pages, or hang a smart TV in a public area and set its URL to a specific NewsFeedId to create an Airport style monitor of shared information keeping everybody on the same page.

Manage 2000 Web Technology - The Big Picture

The Manage 2000 ERP application includes a website for accessing information from web browsers. What is the significance of this? How does it provide value to the people and businesses that run Manage 2000?

• Communication
• Inside your organization and outside your organization
• Desktop, Tablet, and Smart Phone
• Reusable, brand-able, easy to use, graphic rich, web technology
• Seamless access to web portals for internal PWS users
• Customer Portal for communicating with customers and sales reps
• Vendor Portal for communicating with vendors
• Attachment, PDF, and Note sharing.
• RSS Feeds for integrating with Microsoft Outlook , SharePoint and Lotus Notes and other RSS capable applications
• Web Services for integrating with Microsoft Office Products via VSTO (Visual Studio Tools For Office)
• Build Manage 2000 aware Excel Spreadsheets
• search , validate ids, import data, export data
• Build Word Documents with action panes integrating Manage 2000 functionality
• Think credit letters with address block and aging built live from Manage 2000
• JSON REST Services and CORS support for integrating Manage 2000 intelligence into other web based applications.

What is Manage 2000 Web Technology all about?

Communication. The ability to get ERP information in front of people’s eyes in the applications that they use regularly, on the devices they have available, in an affordable manner.

Out Of the Box Experience (OOBE Newbie New)

Well the development cutoff of Manage 2000 7.3 sp3 is done. I have upgraded our build system and development web server to sp4 where 7.3 future development will happen, and created the views for patching sp3. Now I wait and wait and wait while Release Control readies installs for the field and customer sites slowly rollout new service pack upgrades or come on board from older major releases.

One of the areas I have been trying to enrich is the How To documentation on various web setup processes. I hope this combined with more appropriate Sales Rep and Customer menus and default role preferences will make setting up external access to Manage 2000 less daunting, and thereby give more Manage 2000 sites ROI justification for upgrading to the newest Manage 2000 release.

Imagine Sales Reps, Service Personnel, Buyers for customers at trade shows pulling out their IPhone, Droid, or IPad and interacting directly with your Manage 2000 site.

IE 9.0 Firefox 4,5,6... and counting and Chrome

Manage 2000 7.3 sp3 is now building in development with IE9 compatibility in standards mode with HTML 5.0 support. WhooooooooooooHooooooooooooooooo!!!

Development is scheduled to continue till mid-October giving a nice cushion for alpha testing to clean up any construction debris. So things are looking good for 7.3 sp3.

I still need to spend some quality time with the roiScreenControl used in the web product configurator to implement the new scrolled set capability and make it cross browser compatible with Chrome and Safari. But other than that everything seems to be running well in IE9, Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

A nice side benefit of the IE9 project for 7.3 sp3 is that more of the mobile tools and applications slated for 7.4 will make an early appearance. The ESOP module in particular will start sporting a sleek mobile look with a sales product code browsing app with add to cart capability, and mobile formatted shopping cart and checkout pages.

ITouch'd Manage 2000

Well the Manage 2000 7.4 web repository is finally branched and 7.4 only development can now be checked in. But one last web tools development project did make it into the 7.3 sp3 code base before the branch; MT/M2000Mobile/M2000Mobile.aspx provides navigation based on MENU.MASTER trees and DEMO/MobileStockStatusByLoc/MobileStockStatusByLoc.aspx which provides an example application to copy.

The idea is to build HTML, javascript, and CSS styles that mimic mobile applications, rather than building applications in proprietary environments one end-user device at a time. Using micro-frameworks like WebApp.Net one can build a web page that looks and feels like a mobile app although it runs in the browser.

Sp2 just went out the door so we won't be launching sp3 for awhile but it should be available in plenty of time for stocking stuffers.

7.3 sp1 GA Cutoff Week

Well midnight Thursday is the end of the line for 7.3 sp1 development. I've been cleaning and testing and sweeping up crumbs. My latest clean-up binge has been the DEMO.DATA. The lack of examples of web feeds has been bothering me for the last couple of years, so I bit the bullet and started creating a series of example web feeds for customers, and sales reps, and executives. It's not the end-all and be-all of demo material, but at least it will be there in the SSP account. And it has brought out a number crumbs to clean up :)

I've got one or two more bugs (legitimately called treasures if I can fix them prior to them getting to the field) to clean up before the Thursday cutoff. But I am feeling really good about the Manage-2000 7.3 release. It just has a ton of good stuff.

Whats It All About ... Alpha

The alpha test cycle of Manage 2000 release 7.3 is complete. Time to send it through the car wash and prepare for delivery to our beta sites. Lane and Alky will have a busy January getting a clean release ready for Tina, Mark, and Mike. I have to bite my development tongue and stop trying to sneak one more feature into the web tools. Time to get busy on the component and control documentation and the web course-ware instead, to catch it up to the VS2008 world.

Can't stop thinking about the impact of all the development work from over the past two years for Manage 2000 sites going to 7.3.

Sprinting To The 7.3 Finish Line

Funny things happen when you present your work to others. Brain cells fire about what you wish you had done in addition to what you did actually accomplish. I had just finished talking about the web last keys enhancements and was getting ready to talk about web feeds when some severely neglected axons and dendrites conspired to revolt, or in this case maybe just volt, and then it occurred to me...

So, what if you put up the Manage 2000 7.3 site as an externally facing portal. And what if the portals supported attachments. Customers could attach documents to sales orders, or vendors could attach documents to purchase orders and internal users could interact with the attachments from the internal portals, or in fact from PWS functions.

I was not thinking I could sneak this in before Beta, but as of Wed. morning I have been merrily attaching objects via portals on our development box. And more importantly (as Jim often reminds me) it's cute.

Now What To Do With All This Cool Stuff

So we've got prototype.js and .Net 3.5, what does that mean to the users. Well for ESOP users it means a killer shopping cart app. Fast, fast, fast. Constantly saved carts. In screen customer pricing and critical path availability date calculations. Cart navigation using page-up, page-down, line-up, line-down keyboard keys, or of course, mousing. 2-3 click checkout.

SoPortal advance search now sports a faster cleaner data entry screen with instant validation displays.

ProductConfigurator generates CONFIG.CODE based model entry screens with high speed data entry using delimiter and section lengths.

And of course lots better cross browser support for Firefox users.

Puttin On The Ritz

The Mid-Western User Group meeting was held on Thursday with folks coming in from as far away as Indiana and Illinois.  It was, as usual, a family reunion atmosphere with familiar faces and warm greetings.  What strikes me about the content, looking back at it, is the amount of information exposure possiblities.  MITS 2nd go-round on its report writer looks well done.  The NovoRoiSystems real-time SQL data warehouse continues to wow.  Now with more in-bound interfacing it is starting to grow into something much more significant than just an on-ramp to MS Reporting Services.  I spent some time on the growing ATOM/RSS news feed capabilities.

The most fun, for me, was showing off the 7.3 web UI improvements with Last Keys, Most Recently Used stacks and AutoFill.  We broke the seamingly endless barage of technical detail with YouTube clips from the "Puttin On The Ritz" Gene Wilder/Peter Boyle song and dance number in "Young Frankenstein".  Don't know that I could sing and dance on the same stage as Gene Wilder, but I feel pretty confident about being able to croon along with the monster!

After a memorial day break I'll be heading back into the 15 portal projects.  I am adding a news reader panel that can display a configurable Manage 2000 news feed, and converting them from XSLT generated forms to WebControls so that they can be controlled through the PageViewFilter system. Fun, fun, fun....

Last Keys and Other UI Friendliness

The last keys project is winding down.  I just checked in the latest round of javascript upgrade for the m2kInputData function which includes a Most-Recently-Used stack on the up/down arrows, automatic display of validation name or description, and Auto-Fill from the MRU stack.  Yes scope creep is a problem, but they were low hanging fruit once the \LK infrastructure was developed. It would be wasteful not to gather them in while I was harvesting.

There are still a few more i's to dot and t's to cross, but it is starting to feel pretty impressive when you type along on the devweb and get the sort of experience you are only used to from PWS.

Next up will be some refactoring to reduce the startup time from PWS.

FRx Interuptions

Wimpy Winter Weather here in Minneapolis this year. The side roads are finally died white after todays not so rush hour dusting. Like one who grew up with the white trunks of a birch forest there is an unconscious expectation of color reversal which surprises me when it goes missing.

Round II of PageViewFilters and completion of the CTO Interpreter have languished while I help with field support for the FRx interface to the GltInquiry web function.

All of my relections lately are colored by Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat". I wonder about the shift of emphasis from internal development in Manage 2000 to building the myriad of interfaces onto complimentary products available with 7.1. I wonder how the 7.1 web function capabiliy will help customers cope with the flattening world. How fast is the game changing. How much time do business have to adjust, deploy, invent.

Through the Looking Glass

Well I am getting ready for move number 3 since EPICOR bought out ROI Systems. Friday I pack up my cubicle for relocation to the 11th floor. Somehow the square footage of cubible allocated per programmer continues to dwindle. I am hoping the accountants are not shooting for equilibrium based on square foot costs in Monterey. On the upside the hallways are very wide and luxurious!

As I reflect on email queries from client web programmers obviously schooled in SQL and not so familiar with the Unidata world or the Manage 2000 toolset, it is clear to me that the REPORT.BUILD interpreter and the roiHyperQuery control offer extremely cheap efficient options for exposing ERP data out to the world. Only it is difficult to help them 'see' it. The expectation that knowing sqlCommand is enough is too stultifying. Is it worth learning another layer beyond Microsoft technology? When that layer provides CrossRef and Function Security and F1 help and edit patterns and defaults maintainable in dictionaries on the application server, and dictionary driven queries, and interactive UI screens based on REPORT.BUILD prompt definitions, the answer to me is clearly yes. But you have to expect to spend some time coming up to speed. There is a lot of tooling knowledge to learn.