Attendees at the inaugural meeting of the Infor LX and BPCS User Group held at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham learnt about Infor’s future plans for its LX ERP solution and the latest tools for developing systems on the IBM i platform. The event was hosted by Proximity Enterprise Solutions.
Senior Business Consultant at Infor, Nigel Barker provided an overview of Infor’s vision, strategic plans and roadmap for LX. Barker explained the history of Infor LX’s innovation from Infor BPCS, the original mainstay of IBM’s midrange server market, through LX 8.3.0 to the current 8.3.4 10x version which was released in February.
Barker gave an overview of enhancements that the new version of LX provides, including information on the Infor Development Framework (IDF) and Infor’s Enterprise General Ledger (EGLi), which is fully IDF enabled. Barker also explained the possibilities for fast and simple integration of Infor and non-Infor applications through its ION architecture.
Delegates learnt that an additional driver within the 10X version is the “creation of work experiences that people love”, a project conducted by Infor’s internal design and creative agency, Hook and Loop.
As part of this process, Infor has provided user interface improvements such as one-click application navigation; single sign-on across Infor applications; context tools and analytics; and the delivery of workflow and event notifications through Infor’s social enterprise tool, Ming.le.
In the second half of the event, Dave Pickburn, director at Proximity, provided insight into the latest tools available for developing fully functional web-based applications on the IBM i platform.
“The IBM i is a much more open platform than it was even two years ago and is now an excellent platform for the development of mobile and responsive applications,”
said Pickburn.
Pickburn provided delegates with a number of examples, including Stream, a cloud-based collaborative order and transport management system that has been developed in PHP on Proximity’s own IBM i.
He also demonstrated the capabilities of BCD Software (now Fresche Solutions)’s Presto tool for transforming green screens to web-based interfaces and showed delegates the new UK-version of the BCD Software website, which has been developed on the PHP based Drupal content management platform running on IBM i.
“IBM i developers should think functions as well as applications when developing browser-based software. The data in existing DB2 applications is available and existing logic can be reused including calls to RPG and CL programs, while existing screens can be reworked and redeveloped using tools such as BCD Software’s Presto”
says Pickburn.
Speaking about the event, David Maskrey, director at Proximity Enterprise Solutions said:
“The inaugural User Group was a huge success with very good feedback from all attendees. The next User Group meeting will be held early next year and we are looking forward to hosting another informative event”.
The Infor LX User Group has been put together by Proximity Enterprise Solutions, a recent addition to the Leeds and Nottingham-based Proximity Group. Proximity provides a range of specialised development and maintenance services focused on IBM i applications.
Posted by Paul on 1st August 2014.