Is there an easier way to email exported reports to recipients?

Good afternoon,

We have a lot of users who rely on automated emailed reports. In most systems I've used, setting up one-off emailed reports isn't a challenge but there's a lot that seems to go into it with GHR. We may have learned 'the long way' and there could be an easier solution we're not aware of, but consider this scenario:

We have five managers in a department who want a monthly report emailed to them with their active headcount.
I could show them how to run this report themselves via Export To CSV on the list they want to use, but they specifically want to emailed because they're not in the system often and just want the data.
I can set up a scheduled job that runs the report, exports it to CSV and emails it to them, but that requires the following steps:
- Create a record on ReportDistributionProfile, adding their email addresses in the Other Distribution Options tab.
- Create a record on ReportDistributionGroup and link that group to the profile in step 1.
- Go to the report they need and set that Group on the third tab of the Export To CSV popup.
- To schedule it regularly, we'd then use the Schedule tab to set a scheduled recurrence.
Once set up, it generally works but if it happens to fail, there's no information in async to tell us why the email didn't send/work so it puts us at a disadvantage.

This mostly works but that's a lot of permanent set up. If an enhancement is needed then I will certainly submit one, but would it not be possible to just add a tab to that Export To CSV form that allows us to send one-off reports to a few email recipients? This setup is worth the 10+ minutes when it's a recurring report for a large audience but it's counterproductive to set them up for smaller recipient groups.

Otherwise, does anyone know of an easier way to do this? The ReportDistributionGroup allows us to use ActorGroups, but that's only helpful to deliver the report to those users My Print Files. We're hoping for an easier solution to send ad hoc reports via email without all this extra setup. Thank you!

Update: Thank you to everyone who replied with additional comments! I still wish Infor would give us the option to enable a 'simple email' box on exports where a user could just enter an address or two directly within the export box, but we still made useful progress here. Two useful things I've found out in the last few days that I hope will help future readers:

Allowing users to email an exported report to one (or up to 20) users
1. Set up the ReportDistributionProfile & ReportDistributionGroup like usual but, instead of setting an ActorGroup or any settings on Other Distribution Options, check the box for "Allow Dynamic Actor Set".
2. Name the Profile/Group something like "Ad Hoc Email Report" and, when the exporting user selects that Group while exporting, it will open a second drop-down list. This list is the Actor business class and it will send the email associated with the Actor profile you select.
Using ActorGroup instead of Other Distribution Options
1. We were originally using the To/From/Subject/etc settings under Other Distribution Options but will likely use ActorGroup moving forward. The To/CC/BCC fields on Other Distribution Options only allow 256 characters so you're limited in the number of users you can email with one group. Instead, using an ActorGroup lets you set up as many Actors as you want and selecting that group will email them all with each distribution.
2. ActorGroup is its own business class. You'd need to create an ActorGroup, add all the users you want to it and then link that ActorGroup to the ReportDistributionProfile. As long as that RDP is linked to a ReportDistributionGroup, you'll be able to select that when exporting (or scheduling) the report.
3. After entering the ActorGroup to the RDP, scroll down and there will be options for Email. You can make the email include the exported report, include it plus a link to My Print Files, etc. That email will then send to all of the users in the ActorGroup, emailing to the email addresses associated with each Actor profile.
4. If you just want the report to land in each user's My Print Files instead of emailing to them, you can set up your RDP and ActorGroup but just not use the email settings at the bottom of the RDP. When the export finishes, it will simply land in each recipients' My Print Files without sending an email.

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dcurtis

We are 78 days into our go-live with Infor CloudSuite. The fact that I don’t know how to do this is not necessarily a reflection of the system’s functionality, but rather, I haven’t found a way to accomplish what you’ve outlined. Previously, we used SmartNotes in S3 for this purpose, which has been a significant point of contention among many of our users. We had 400 SmartNotes in S3, many of which were used to send lists and items. We also used LBI with delivery devices for this purpose. Your step-by-step outline provides me with information I didn’t have before. I’m interested in hearing others’ responses to this as well, as I too would love to find that “easy button”.

robert-canham

The only thing that makes this a little bit easier is creating distribution lists on your exchange that can receive mail and then sending to that. That way you can manage the list in outlook rather than in GHR/FSM.

I would offer one caution. Unless you have setup GHR to use your own email servers, anything you send from the cloud is going unsecure over the internet. It wasn't a concern if you were on premise lawson since everything was internal, but it is something to be aware of when sending emails out of Cloudsuite. I think in general, Infor wants us to get people in the application rather than sending data out of it, so this isn't particularly easy.

One option that may work (I haven't tried it with reports, but I do it with FileCreationUtility) is to create an IPA that is generic and runs a report and sends the output to email. then you create multiple triggers with different variables for reports and recipients.

reaganr

Having an option to email a report from the export to csv function would be a great enhancement request! For the majority of our reports we are directing people to login to GHR to retrieve the report from print files. For reports that must be emailed, our IT team has created IPAs to send them out.

Dr. Awesome

Have you tried a one-time setup of a ReportDistributionGroup that has a profile that simply sets "Allows Dynamic Actor Set"?

When set you CSV export it let's you pick up to 20 Actors via a drop-down like so:

Here I named the Group "ADHOC" and used it to get the Distribution List to display.

Amy Coats

This is amazing - love your work Dr Awesome

robert-canham

I didn't know what that checkbox did, thanks for the explanation.

Dr. Awesome

There is more here on that whole setup screen https://docs.infor.com/lmrk/2024.x/en-us/lmrkolh/default.html?helpcontent=lmrkadmcug_cl/dpf1541464569665.html

Also interesting might be "Burst By Actor" - essentially this will apply the targeted actor's security to the report output (rather than just the one actor who ran/scheduled it). So you can have a report targeted at supervisors and they should only see what is appropriate for them (based on security LPL policies).

unknown

We are successfully using scheduled reports to email reports to people (with some of the limitations discussed here).

I will mention another thing to watch for: when you have your lower environments refreshed from production, it copies the scheduled actions. We had a issue where the recipients were getting multiple emails with bad data and it took us weeks to figure out that 3 of our environments were sending reports to the people after recent refreshes.

We check for scheduled actions now after refreshes.

robert-canham

I'll second the refreshes. We suspend all of our async queues in the target (except System Purge Queue) before the refresh and don't turn them back on until we've cleared out all finished and pending triggers and delete all scheduled tasks. There is also a configuration parameter you can set on any product line or gen to do everything that overrides the to email address. We have this set so that any emails sent from our non-prod environments go to a bucket for my IT team so nothing gets to the users. The downside is it doesn't affect non-landmark apps like IDM.

component: email
key: mail.proxy
value: email address

michael-anastasia

Thank you, I did not know about this but it's a helpful feature to know about!

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