Managing Lanpaks in Sage 300 ERP 2014

Introduction

If you look in our product feedback site at https://www11.v1ideas.com/Sage300ERP/Accpac you will notice a number of items in the top ideas section to do with managing Sage 300 ERP Lanpaks. In the upcoming Sage 300 ERP 2014 release, we are adding a number of features to help with this.

How to Tell Who is Using Lanpaks

We’ve always had a screen accessible from the Desktop’s Help menu where you can get a list of the Lanpaks in use, and who is using them. However there was a fundamental flaw in this screen, namely that you needed to log on to the Desktop to access it and this required using a Lanpak. So if you were out of Lanpaks, you couldn’t log in and see who was doing what.

Now if you run the Desktop, you can cancel the signon dialog and select Help – Current Users… This then will give you a signon dialog where you can signon specifically to see who is on the system without using a Lanpak. To demonstrate I did this on my laptop and the screenshot is below.

Notice that no Lanpaks were used in bringing up this screen. So now if you are out of Lanpaks and need one, you can access this screen, see what people are doing and then ask the person doing the least important work to sign-out.

Giving More Information

Previously, all the Lanpak screen told you was which user was logged into which company, you didn’t know what they were actually doing. In fact many companies have only one company and everyone logs in as ADMIN, in which case the screen gave you no useful information. The usual suggestion here is to setup users and security properly, but for Sage 300 ERP 2014 we are giving quite a bit more useful information in our new “Current Users” screen.

Now we give you the users along with their contact information. Sorry for the two screen shots, but one shows the information with the horizontal scroll bar scroll left and the next one with the scroll bar scrolled right.

Further there is an option to see all the screens that they are running and the time when they started the screen.

The screen AS9010 is the Desktop and will have a proper description by the time we ship.

This way you can make a judgment on who you want to kick out of the system. Perhaps user1 is only running data entry screens and you know they have gone home, so you can log them off. Or perhaps user2 is running I/C Day End Processing and only started it just now, so you want to let that run to completion.

Besides using this screen to manage Lanpaks once they run out, you can also use this screen to see what people are doing when the system is slow, perhaps lots of people are printing reports or posting batches. Either way you can use this to manage more cases than just Lanpaks. Managing periodic slowdowns is one case, looking for low usage times to run larger reporting or processing runs is another.

The descriptions come from the language DLL that is generated from the VB template that is part of the Sage 300 ERP SDK. This means that we will be able to display good screen names for any Sage or third party application that is written in the SDK and uses the VB UI template. We also know about a few special cases like the Desktop.

For IAPs we don’t give as much information since this tends to be used by third party non-SDK applications that we don’t know about.

For this version we don’t provide a mechanism to kick people out from here. We are considering this for a future version, but want to get this rights, so we don’t just kill a process while some one is entering an order and causing them to lose their work. However if you are running on Terminal Services then you can use the Terminal Services console to kick people right out of Windows from there.

Ideas Web Site

As I mentioned in the introduction, this feature was the direct result of input to our ideas web site. So to just stress that if there are features you want added to Sage 300 ERP, be sure to add them here. If others agree with you and it makes it to the top of the list, then it has a very good chance of being implemented. Notice that the ideas web site lists the ideas that we have implemented, ideas in progress and which are the current top rated ideas. Feel free to promote your idea on Sage City, this can help get your idea implemented with sufficient support.

Summary

With the forthcoming Sage 300 ERP 2014 release we are giving you better methods to manage your Lanpaks. First by letting you see what is going on without using a Lanpak and then second by giving you more useful information on what people are currently doing.