Portal and IE question

Finally, someone else is feeling our pain! Misery loves company! Yes, you must install Microsoft XML 4.0 SP2, and hotfix KB832414 in order to run ESS. Yes, it's a pain to install on each and every workstation, including maintaining this on Citrix. And the most painful part is that after you've done so, some Microsoft updates seem to overwrite parts of the install and you must reinstall XML and the patch occasionally. Yes, we've let Lawson know of the pain, and I'm looking forward to finding out how long this pain lasts--does it carry over into 9.x? Does anyone know? We're implementing a desktop-management solution to push these types of updates to all corporate-based computers.

Greg, depending on which version of ESS you're using (i.e. "hrnet" vs. "xhrnet"), you may not have the issues. The old HTML (hrnet) version will not need the patches.

Oh, and I almost forgot to add the home-use info. We posted the requirements to use ESS on the login page of the portal just under the tan login box, and even though we tell employees that we will not support their home PC's for portal use, they still call the Helpdesk. Because of our customer service initiatives, we end up doing the most minimal assist we can to get them in, or request they use a work computer. Even more pain--helping update home PC's...... Good luck!

Thanks for the well-wishes.
Just to be clear here, I'm going to re-state the issue:
We are implementing Lawson's Employee Self Service module and will need to to support Portal access
for approximately 5000 employees. One of the main issues that we need to address is supporting users'
remote access to the application. To accomplish this we need to determine how to deal with the Microsoft
"msxml.msi" updates that need to be applied to resolve the "Error on page" messages that are experienced
when users attempt to log into Portal.

Any recommendations on how we can:
a) Eliminate the need to install the "msxml.msi" updates. (preferred solution)
b) Simplify the process for users to install the updates on their home PCs.
c) Simplify the administrative overhead required to apply the updates to approximately 3500 PCs
that vary with OS and IE browser versions.

Our current solution is to have the users log into Citrix servers that have had the updates applied to them
and launch the browser sessions. However, not all of our users have access to the Citrix servers. We
would prefer to allow the users to be able to launch the application from their own PCs

I have not seen anyway to eliminate the need for installing the patches.

Most organizations that control their desktops via SMS-type processes just push the patches to the desktops that they can control, etc.

Couple of solutions I have seen are 1) modify the Portal "splash/login" page to include links to the patches with an explanation that "if you have problems logging in, etc. install these patches.", or 2) send an oganization-wide email as part of the ESS rollout that includes links to the patches.

At a previous employer, all login attampts first had to run JavaScript that detected whether users had the correct patches. If not, they were directed to download patches from our web server. I think that we may also have created some of our own MSIs, to make the install process easier, but that was done by our hard-core Windows geek. You could redirect requests for /lawson/portal to first pass go to a page with a script like that. I don't think that I saved a copy of the script, but it would not be difficult to reproduce.

By the way, I'd strongly discourage you from making ESS available over the Internet. Lawson IOS 8 is rife with insecurities, so your data is only as secure as the weakest web password.