Introducing Infor Workspace: Delivering on Our Innovation Promise

In an internal call last week, Infor president Duncan Angove reiterated our company’s promise to deliver more new products and enhancements this year than at any time in our nine-year existence.  All told, we are on track to launch nearly four dozen new products and more than 600 enhancements.

Infor Workspace

Last Thursday, we introduced Infor Workspace, the new user experience that will become the standard across our major applications. If you attended any of the Inforum events last fall, you may have seen some of the early iterations, which were code-named CompanyOn and later Companion. The Infor Workspace prototype is a dramatic improvement over the earlier versions—see for yourself.

Infor Workspace is based on Microsoft SharePoint, the best-selling enterprise portal /collaboration platform deployed by more than 100 million users. Gartner recently named SharePoint as the leader in the User Experience Platform (UXP) market.

Infor Workspace provides a single sign-on to all of the applications that can be accessed via SharePoint’s Site Pages. These apps are represented by the icons on the left side of the screen. What’s not obvious is that these applications don’t have to run on the same server or in the same data center.  For example, you can switch from your Infor SyteLine ERP system running on a local server to Infor Expense Management in the cloud, or to Infor EAM deployed at another site. The user experience stays consistent across all of the applications.

On the right side of the screen, you see one of the widgets we’ve built using SharePoint’s Web Parts. This allows us to support maps from Mapquest or Google, currency and time conversion tools, and nearly anything else that you can envision. We have a lot of cool things in the lab.

Business software that looks like consumer apps

While the new user experience brings us closer to the dream of providing software that looks more like consumer apps, the real benefit is the inclusion of in-context business intelligence, alert management, and collaboration. As you move between screens or applications, you can get different views of real-time performance. For example, the sales order screen could have a dashboard showing the number of orders received so far in the period relative to the forecast. Or, it could trigger an alert showing that the customer has exceeded his/her credit limit.

As for collaboration, it’s logical to assume that our customers will want to have unified communications software that can support instant messaging, voice over IP, video chat, and the like. Similarly, I would expect to see strong interest for new location-based offerings. Stay tuned.

We have begun rolling out Infor Workspace to customers using Infor ERP LN, Infor ERP SyteLine, Infor EAM, Infor Expense Management, and Infor FMS SunSystems. Our roadmap includes a lot more Infor applications. The only requirement is that the application has to be web-based to take full advantage of the new user experience.

The combination of Infor Workspace, the Infor ION integration platform, the new reporting capabilities, and the option of cloud deployments should help drive significant new business for Infor. I would be willing to wager that it will also encourage a lot of customers to move to the newest versions of their favorite Infor applications.

As for what’s coming next, I promised to keep you posted on the other 46 new products as well as the 600+ enhancements. This is a great time to be at Infor.

Finally, baseball season is here

By the time you read this, the first games of the 2011 Major League Baseball Season will have been completed.  For the last 15 years, I have welcomed the arrival of Opening Day with my favorite passage from A. Bartlett Giamatti’s “The Green Fields of the Mind.”

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

After the miserable winter we had in Boston, I can hardly wait to smell the fresh cut grass at Fenway. Play Ball!

Comments

[Lisa Disselkamp]

The link to the sample screen is great. Can you provide links to similar screens for your timekeeping, labor scheduling and labor anaytics modules (the various parts of time and attendance)? I read on LinkedIn about your concept of "socializing the enterprise" and I'd like to see examples of that for time and attendance.