How do you secure the larger stand-alone developments that run within Smart Office? This is a question that I have had to ask on some developments. Because your development isn’t native M3 code you can’t secure it through the traditional SES400 or SES003 methods.
So how do you allow some users access to some functions but not others, or just read access, rather than read/write?
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There are times when you want to bulk load data, especially if you are doing significant process changes or new customer installs, unfortunately there aren’t really any generic bulk load tools that I’ve come across that are…um…free or don’t offend my sensibilities 🙂
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When I was a kid, I had an Amiga 500 – and I absolutely loved watching demos, especially when they had starfields…I saw the evolution of simple parallax starfields out to more complex starfields that you would fly through and they would rotate and do all-sorts of snazzy things.
Roll on 2015 and I still haven’t grown up…I still love starfields. I was preparing some content for the AU/NZ User group conference (IMUN) so I thought I would have some fun!
Some of you will have noticed a few changes recently…a new font for the site 🙂
And a new domain…and the purpose of this post – a page which will take you to some development forums (http://forum.potatoit.kiwi).
For quite some time I’ve wanted to create some M3 development specific forums or a mailing list as a nice and convenient way for people to ask quick questions or to share experiences around developing for M3.
I entertained the idea of dropping it on to my server at home, but as you can see from the photo below – home based servers have a tendency to get overwhelmed by dust puppies though mine hasn’t quite gone that far, it’s just a matter of time. Not to mention that during summer my office gets pretty warm – not exactly lending confidence in the life expectancy of the drives.
I also considered setting up a mailing list – but that’s so…um…’90s.
What I have ended up doing is spinning up a hosted service on godaddy in to which I could install Vanilla Forums. The big bonus being that I don’t have to patch or maintain the service – it is all part of the godaddy service.
Currently I have it set up so you need to register and be approved before you can post (I’m a little paranoid about spambots) and you have the option of either logging in against your facebook account (it’s federated authentication) or a traditional ‘local’ account for authentication. I am also considering enabling the ability to use a federated twitter account for authentication…
Anyways, let the experiment begin.
Cheers,
Scott
A little heads up – M3 UI Adapter 10.3.0.0 moves much of the mne\ directories into either a Postgres or MS SQL database.
Looks like the JScripts move in to the database too.
See the ISOAG_10.2.1_W.pdf (Smart Office Admin guide page 119, and M3COREAG_13.3.0_W.pdf (M3 Core admin guide around page 112)
A little heads up – if you have licenses for the Mashup Designer, the Mashup Designer SDK is available from the download portal. (Technology -> Infor User Experience -> Infor Mashup Designer)
It’s also worth noting that the Smart Office 10.2.1 version of the SDK is also available under the “Infor Smart Office SDK – M3” under the release 10.2.
Back in the dim dark past, before IFLs M3 install became gridified I had set up Nagios (an open source monitoring tool) to check the autojobs – this would verify that the autojobs had a status of OK and it would also check that we had the correct number of autojobs. Back in those dark days, we did have the occasional issue where one or some of the autojobs would cease to work.
Once we went to the grid, this was no longer possible due to how the grid structured its data and I couldn’t determine a way to scrape the screen given it was generated through Javascript and ajax calls. But at that point of IFLs M3 journey, autojob issues weren’t as common so rather than spend the time looking for clever ways to do things it just became a part of the morning process to check the autojobs with a webbrowser. As I had a staff member that I could fob this task off to, I was happy 🙂
In an earlier posting I mentioned I have had a number of discussions around monitoring and M3, so the aim of this post is around demonstrating again, that by using the tools built in to Windows 8 / Windows Server 2010 onwards we can quickly and easily create crude but effective monitoring.
This Powershell script will check that the number of running autojobs is what we expect (54 in IFLs case) and if it isn’t, it will list the autojobs as we would see them in the Grid Management pages and send an email alert. The aim is that it would be scheduled to be run by the task scheduler every 5 – 15 minutes.
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Todays post is about the poor mans M3 monitoring, I want to demonstrate that with existing tools you can quickly and easily get emailed notifications if any of your grid applications go offline. You don’t need to install anything for this to work in a current Windows environment.
Over the years I’ve seen a number of people whose environments aren’t configured correctly and don’t have MWS Designer installed correctly. This post is to run through the setup and creating some webservices. I deliberately haven’t gone in to detail on how to consume those webservices as this post is quite long as it is.
Please be aware that MWS is the only Infor supported method of querying the database (there is currently no supported method for directly updating the database). Incidentally over the years we’ve heard the ‘M3 caches’ data and MWS is cache aware and there has been some anecdotal evidence to suggest that this may infact be the case in the later versions of M3 (eg 15.1.2).
So what is MWS Designer?
MWS Designer is a front-end to develop webservices to wrap SQL queries, M3 APIs and M3 Display Programs. It also provides the ability to deploy the xml files to your MWS servers and to create unit tests.
Be aware that the files MWS Designer creates for the webservices can be created by hand if you live and breath XML.
Note: Infor license MWS and MWS Designer separately. Often they sell them separately, which is ridiculous and I know a number of very unhappy customers that have been left in this situation.
Just a wee heads up for rookies like me using ADFS with Mingle.
When installing ADFS, make sure that the server name for the Windows server you install ADFS on is different to the Federation Service name.
Potato IT 