Does your organization use Smart Office or intend to get it? Are you able to justify the costs of Smart Office by enhancing productivity?

In my opinion there are several reasons as to why LSO is better for productivity for your “core”/”Heads down” users:
1. They can have more than 1 screen open at a time. This allows for easier analysis between screens
2. Collaboration is huge. To be able to within 3 clicks take a filtered list view of data someone else needs to act upon and send it to Excel, word or outlook makes it so easy to work with people. This is the big seller of LSO to me. The ability to collaborate with others in ways portal will not allow you to do easily.
3. Personalizations. It is not Burger King but each user can have it their way. I can use list forms while the person next to me uses the standard form. I can reset my tab order on AP20 while others don’t. I can remove fields and change field display titles while you leave yours alone.
4. Info browsers can be set up by Super users or IT and just sit on the canvas. One of our users set up 3 browsers to track AC/Grants expiring today, this month and the next 60 days. These act like a smart note on a dashboard and use the same scheduling engine.
5. News Readers can replace bookmarks or you could use them to provide a business process like PR processing. Each link is to a form, report, spreadsheet, or mashup that forms your business process. No more looking back to notes to find the next step.
6. LSO provides the basis for Mashups. Mashups can take multiple forms, list forms, tables, LBI content and external URL and pass data between them. This eliminates clicks and keystrokes to simplify any business process. I am an fan of LSO and a huge supporter of Mashups! Highly recommended
7. One Click technology makes upgrading the workstations a breeze. LSO is upgraded on the server and when I double click my icon to open LSO it auto updates. No maintenance for IT. Only downside is that it does not work with roaming profiles on the PC’s.

We are working on the click counts to show the justification was worth it. One of our users was without LSO after getting a new PC for a week while we were at Inforum. Her comment when we got back was that she missed it and couldn't believe the difference after being without it for only a week.

In the words of Monty Python .. And now for something completely different.  Our experience with LSO has been far less favorable.  LSO is a ClickOnce application, which Mark correctly points out does not work with Windows roaming profiles.  LSO is also having a bit of an issue with Windows 64 bit machines and RQC.  It also requires MSXML 4 SP2 or SP3 to operate correctly.  We've had spooky behaviors with dual LSO client installs (one pointing at TEST and the other at PROD).  The global Mango settings often don't stick (like setting up profiles and enabling or disabling the selector).  There are a number of bugs in v9 and v10.  For example, external links in v10 have a name corruption issue if you use them to call an exteral browser (to get around the 64 bit issue for RQC lets say).  The info browser also doesn't appear to be working in v10.  There is no way to deploy updated canvas settings to your users outside of having them open the saved .jade file .. the server .jade is only pulled down on first load of the ClickOnce application.  You can't setup form personalization on a global or role basis without giving all your users the formpersonalization role.  And there are NO complete release notes at the time for v10 .. these are due in June.  I could go on but let's just say there are a lot of gotchas.  If you get things to work and stabilize on that then some of the pluses that Mark mentioned are really nice .. but it can be a major headache getting there.

There is one more thing worth noting.  Portal goes away under Infor 10.  You will be required to run either the Infor client or LSO to access Infor 10.  Just something to add to the decision process.

The RQC issue with MSXML parser is not an LSO issue we see that with RQC /Portal Users and had to get the desktop team to add this to the standard seed for new deployments.

I am not sure what is happening with Test and PROD installs, we have it running side by side on our desktops for the super users without issue. The links have a slightly different syntax to them, I think there is a video on the lawson tech blog on setting those up.

While at Inforum, we went to a number of sessions on version 10. The good news is Portal is really just being repackaged inside of Sharepoint. Think of it like portal with a sharepoint wrapper. The good part of that is that short term your forms, DS forms, etc will all act the same way, you just access them inside sharepoint. This relieved some of my concerns about going to 10.

We are still looking at 18 months before we upgrade to version 10 but the reduced efforts to learn sharepoint and ion made me feel much better about that upgrade.

Our biggest issues have been more PC related than LSO related. As you are deploying, it is key to review the PC's. We have seen different responses based on the hardware. We had narrowed it down that new Win 7 PC's with 4Gb of Ram were fine. We later learned the graphics card plays a big role in performance and quirky issues that individuals would see.

It is hard to track down sporatic issues and when your souces of the issues being PC, Server,LSO, Lawson; you have to be dillegent and track the source. We were lucky enough to see the issues on older PC's with XP SP3 2-3GB Ram early on. We had to slow our rollout until we could get PC replacements but now are off and running again.

Jim mentions some of the items that can/can't be pushed out by role. We have put in that enhancement request. Others that are seeing that issue should do the same so more customers asking for the same things get a higher priority. I know it will not be in the LSO version being released most likely next week but is on the list for future.

Like I said, LSO is nice once you've got it stabilized.  But getting there can be a bear.  Every app has quirks.  My issue is that for something Lawson is pushing as a standardized front end to their product it should be QA'd a bit better and not as quirky.  That v9 and v10 made it out the door and was never tested against 64 bit RQC is unacceptible.  Just don't want the poster to think Lawson is simply "all better" with LSO.

Jim, I agree. Once you get it stable it is nice. The key is the moving parts of it could be server, could be LSO, could be a Lawson app issue or it could be the PC. You add complexity to the review and issue resolution process. I separated the RQC 64 bit issue from LSO since we saw that in portal as well. It was a pain to have new PC's rolled out with Win 7 64 Bit and then have users not be able to order using RQC. We quickly found the parser issue and corrected it but desktop had to go touch some 40 PC's.

While not an LSO issue in my mind it was a QA issue with the Lawson product. They are addressing alot of requests and enhancements in LSO /Mashups that are improving the product. Once you get to LSO 10.02 the speed is significantly faster. Some load of forms is 5-10 times faster. If you have issues you are seeing I would be glad to collaborate, it may be something we are either experiencing or have experienced and I might be able to help.

Mark,

Are you planning to move to 10.0.3 when it is released next week? Heard anything about a list of issues resolved in this release and any known issues with the release?

Jim