Homepages Use Cases

Hi,

My name is Shan Molu and I'm the current product manager for Infor Homepages. I'd like to get some insight on how you all are using Homepages and what your Homepages look like. For anyone interested in sharing, do you mind showing a screenshot of your Homepages set up? I'm also interested in learning which widgets you are commonly using, and which Homepages features are being used (mandatory pages, default pages, featured content, etc.).

This information will help prioritize items on our roadmap, as well as potentially add new functionality to the application.

I think this could be beneficial for other users in the forum, but if you want to send this to me directly feel free to reach out to me at shan.molu@infor.com.

Thanks!

Shan

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Comments

steve mcenany

I've written a few widgets for our team to hit APIs and simplify processes for the team. For example a widget to pull a customer list, allow the user to select it, then with one click -- Run an AR open items report and reprint all invoices that are past due into a PDF for the customer to review. Another widget uses an API call to get a list of all open cartons in the warehouse to be sure our TWL processes have met their deadlines and ship the orders. We also use homepages for BI graphs and dashboards of KPI data. One challenge is adding pages to users logins as an administrator, I'd like to be able to impersonate a user vs logging in as that person to setup their specific options and page layouts.

Legacy Contributor

These are great use cases - thanks for sharing. I'm sure others will appreciate that as well.

As for your challenge with setting up pages for other users, is it more around building a page and assigning the pages to users? Or seeing what pages are available and how pages/widgets are displayed for other users?

Wichtige Lösungen in der Wissensdatenbank Februar 2013.pdf

Nick James

Shan,

We have access to Homepages only because we bought ION for the ability to write interfaces, and that gave us everything that came along with the InforOS stack. I believe we over-invested in what we were looking to get, but since we have access to all of these other tools, such as Homepages, I would like to learn how to use those tools.

Do you have any walk-throughs or videos on how to setup Homepages? This is not something that my boss will want me to invest any time in since I am already knee deep in my other Infor projects. However, if I could throw together something that is presentable and useful on my own time, I could make a case for using this product.

I saw some of the dashboards that you have posted, and I believe our executives would like that, but I also need to make it useable by my mid-management and front line producers for it to be worth our while.

Thanks,

Nick

Legacy Contributor

Hi Nick,

Hopefully after you learn a little bit about the Infor OS products, you'll feel a bit more fulfilled about your investment. We do offer many resources on Infor Campus to teach customers about our products. We've also created shorter walkthroughs of our products that are available on our Vimeo page. This album has videos for a majority of our Infor OS products, so if there was something else you were interested in like Infor Document Management, Chat, or Coleman you can find them there.

The Homepages specific video is here: https://vimeo.com/album/3620345/video/276522210

I hope you find these resources useful, if you have any questions let me know.

Shan Molu

shan.molu@infor.com

Legacy Contributor

Hey @nick-james , you made an interesting comment on feeling you over-invested. Is that you only need a subset of integration features that come with ION?

Depending on the level of depth you're using ION, you might be able to squeeze some extra value for very low labor time by putting together some workflows and ION monitors to alert to events and exceptions taking place across your systems. From there, it's a quick skip and a jump to enabling mobile devices to start receiving tasks and alerts, allowing users to execute decisions on approval workflows, etc.

And, of course, those same tasks, workflows, and monitors can be exposed to Homepages so that users logging in have a broad overview of decisions that require their attention or action.

Just some thoughts

Nick James

Mike,

Thanks for your input. The problem is that ION and InforOS are secondary to me. My primary role is to support Infor Public Sector (Hansen) and we purchased ION as a tool to interface with the software and databases used by other business units. I can definitely see the potential of using ION, but we have so many other products being used by different groups which include a DMS and two separate deployments of SharePoint on-prem (not to mention O365 creeping into the mix).

At this point, InforOS is just another black box to me.. It is like staring into the Abyss and feeling a presence staring back at me!

It would be great if I could make a couple of quick connections in ION/Ming.le and have something to show off to the boss, but I am in the middle of a Infor Field Inspector deployment, Trying to do a Rhythm Proof-of-Concept, and an ION interface that has stalled out due to internal politics.

Sorry for the ranting...

Thanks again for the input,

Nick

Legacy Contributor

Hah, well understood Nick. I was actually previously a SyteLine 8.03.11 customer doing integrations as well and it was a balancing act of priorities, investments, and so on. Feel free to reach out, PM me, or start a new thread if you're looking to revisit integration challenges. Plenty of helpful people on the boards.

Once you're ready to hit the ground running on integrations, you'll find baking in additional layers of functionality based on easy business wins should come fairly easily.

Legacy Contributor

Hi Stevemac, your comment seems very interesting as you have created very useful widgets . We are also using homepages to show the standard widgets like Task, Alerts, Insider Posts but never customize or created a new One. I have also opened a incident with infor to ask if we can create our own widgets and customize them according to our requirement but they replied its not possible to create/customize a widget and you can only use the standard widgets available. I am more interested to know how you have created these widgets and what skill set require to do this?

We are also using Infor BI but not using any BI widget as I can not see any widget related to Infor BI.

if you help me that would be very much appreciable. Thanks

steve mcenany

There is a homepages SDK for InforOS, look in the iso file for installing the InforOS program.. You will find the note about where it's located...

Latest SDK can be found on Infor cloud GitHub

github.com/.../homepages-widget-sdk

Navigate to the zip and click 'Download'

This gets you the baseline and some example widgets to start with to begin building your applications. Like calling the ION API to proxy into your business system to run a report.

You also have the option of using the web page widget and configuring it to display a https ssl secure web page inside a widget. For example I use it on a server that can do ODBC calls to the system to pull selected items.

Several ways to be creative with Homepages...

Support is likely not going to get involved with this level of things, it's what you can do or work with ICS to build your application.

Legacy Contributor

Are they all Mingle widgets or Application Homepages?

Legacy Contributor

I gone through with the document and it seems you need a good skill set of building web application and API..I am a ION/BOD Developer and LN Technical not sure if I can do it.

Legacy Contributor

Hi Shan,

I tried following your link to Infor's Vimeo page, but there are no videos there that I can see (see attachement). Do you need a certain membership to be able to see the videos?

Kind regards,

Sofia Danielsson

Legacy Contributor

Hi Sofia,

We've actually moved our Vimeo site over to our YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/.../UCO64l_VdkRQtOLA_NzWD5ug

Best,

Shan

Legacy Contributor

Shan,

We're implementing InforCloudSuite Financials and HR. We're also implementing Birst and in the beginning phases of design.

Users are interested in seeing Birst dashboards in Homepages, but right now, if I copy/paste a dashboard URL into a Birst widget, it takes me to the Birst login screen.

Do you know if this functionality is coming soon?

Thanks,

Nabil

Legacy Contributor

The functionality to create an URL for a dashboard needs to use the web widget.

In the current release the Birst Report Widget is for use with Visualizer reports only – Designer Reports and Dashboards are not supported with that widget. Also, there are only 2 fields in the configuration for that widget: the first is the path/report name, and the second is the filter to be applied (the SSO Parameters page in Birst Help has information about the required syntax to use for the filter, but an example might be: Sales History.Customer Name:Karin Portillo)

You should still be able to construct a SSO URL link to render a Birst Dashboard. You can use the SSO Parameters page in Birst Help to understand how to construct that URL.

If you still have issues please contact support as it might be a configuration issue.

Legacy Contributor

Hi Shan, Is it possible to use HomePage widget created in Application Builder or Mongoose to use as In-Context/Utility Applications?

Legacy Contributor

Hi Jaydeep, if you mean that you have a link directly to an App Builder Application or Mongoose application and Homepages is not involved, then yes. As for having a link to Homepages to load a specific widget in the context area that is not officially supported and not recommended as each time you add a link to Homepages it will load the entire Homepage framework which is not that light weight since it supports a big range of different widgets.

One extra Homepages might work ok but as you start adding more deep links into Homepages you are increasing the footprint in the Browser so it's not recommened.

Legacy Contributor

Hello Karin, I completely agree on that but what I wanted to try is calling specific published widget only. Not the entire Homepage or Application. However, I guess I have found alternative solution for it. Nee to try the same.. Btw many thanks for your answer :-) Best Regards, Jaydeep

Legacy Contributor

Hello all,

I am currently working on setting up homepages for our different departments. Whenever I publish or assign a user a page, I am finding that it is not showing in the users page catalog or added to their profile. There is one other person with admin rights and when he publishes a page the test users can see it. I am not sure why my changes aren't showing up, but his are.

Also, I recently created a couple groups so I could assign the pages to them. When I go to Edit Publishing Configuration>Permissions and select groups, none of my groups show in the drop down list.

Any help would be appreciated.

*Side note: when he adds a user to mingle, that user doesn't show they were added when I go to users (we have a different list of users)*

Thank you!

Legacy Contributor

Hi,

This should have been a new post so that it is easier for others to find the question if they have similar questions.

Any user that has "Allow publish" as settings permissions is allowed to publish pages. Note that even if you assign a single user and not a role, all it means is that the user can find the page in the page catalog.

To "push" a page and force it on a user you will need to be an Homepages administrator and then you can set a Mandatory page. In that case the page will be added to "my pages" automatically for that user.

For newly added IFS roles, Distribution groups and when you add users to IFS roles there is a delay before Homepages will consume the change. I'm afraid you have to wait around 15 min or so before new groups or roles will show up. So that explains any missing groups or IFS roles that you are experiencing. When you add a IFS role to a user that user will have to log out and in again, closing the browser as recommended, before it will get the newly assigned roles. Those are instant but the lists of users, roles etc are cached and synced with some delay to get performance.

As for the side note, where are you looking at the user list? If you are in Homepages it will use the Social User list and it should not be different from the IFS user list but there might be some delay before it's consistent. Overall it will eventually be consistent but it might not be instance when crossing between Mingle - IFS - Homepages.

I recommend adding IFS roles for the departments and to only use that instead of connecting users.

Going back to the original question. The user that you assign view rights to a page (as you publish it) needs to log in and log out again for the changes to take affect and then that user will find the page in the page library. I have never experienced that scenario not working. As you find the page in the page catalog, go to details and in the right panel there is a "has permissions" label that would allow you to see more permissions if you are the owner, content admin or admin.

What is you user set-up as?

1. Homepages usder with permission to publish

2. HOMEPAGES-ContentAdministrator

3. HOMEPAGES-Administrator?

Legacy Contributor

KarinPB,

Sorry about that, a new post would have been the better option now looking at it. Thank you for the response, this is very helpful. I was able to make corrections and now see my groups showing up. I didn't realize that the Homepages use the social groups. I was creating the groups in user management > Manage > Groups. This must be where the distribution groups are created. I also realized that some users are lacking Mingle permissions all together. I have now given them access and am able to see them in the add list when adding them to the social groups (they are not receiving the notification but will check again tomorrow). I will make sure to assign IFS roles to the departments instead of individual users.

In regards to the side note, I was referring to the users under user management. If I assign security roles to departments with users assigned to each then this issue is eliminated. As of right now we are only dealing with a handful of test users and one social test group, but will be importing the entire company list once I have these issues resolved. I got confused because I assumed if the other admin made changes to the security roles of a user, it would change when I check the security permissions.

I was able to locate the "has permissions" and see the list of permissions associated with page.

I had a user test to see if they could see my published page in their catalog but still no luck. They also aren't receiving a notification to join the social "Test Group". The users I am testing have all the mingle and homepage permissions as well as myself. It seems everyone is able to see each others published pages (created earlier by older admins) but not mine. I am not able to see any of the pages published by others in the catalog either. What would be stopping my account from viewing other published pages? It is currently only showing mine in the catalog.

Thanks again for the response, I was able to figure out a lot with this.

Legacy Contributor

Hi,

You are on an older version of Homepages. The use of Social Groups has been deprecated a few releases ago when we added support for Distribution groups and since then it's been completely removed and does not exist in the Cloud version today.

So don't start to use the social groups, or if you do so be sure to replace them with distribution groups later. Use the IFS groups instead for now or update your onprem so that you can get support for the Distribution groups.

There is no notification to join the social group, they would have to find it. I'm not sure why other user's can't see your page and you can't see theirs. It's very strange. Are you an administrator or do you have access to such an account? In the administration pages there are tools for viewing all published pages and there you can see other pages permissions so that you can compare with yours. One option to try would be to edit a page and just republish it again. This option is available in the admin tool in the current cloud version, but I'm not sure it's in the version that you are using.

The issue you are describing with the catalog seems very strange and not something that I have ever seen before. I would check your roles so that you are a HOMEPAGES-User and if you have more permissions check for the other roles I wrote about before.

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