Any strong opinions on Custom Menus(tasks) in E1 as opposed to EnterpriseOne Menu and Favorites

[sholberg]

Any strong opinions on Custom Menus(tasks) in E1 as opposed to EnterpriseOne Menu and Favorites

I would like to get an opinion from other E1 users on the use of custom menus as opposed to using E1 EnterpriseOne Menu and Favorites. We are presently on E1 for HR and Payroll and did not create custom menus. Users put the programs they need in their Favorites. We recently upgraded from 8.12 to 9.0 and users did not loose their Favorites. We are about to upgrade to Financials, Purchasing and Equipment Maintenance and our consultants are saying they have never implemented a site without custom menus. We do not have a lot of E1 developer expertise on site and only do 1 production package promotion a week and we are afraid that custom menus will be an additional burden on CNC for promotions. Any strong feelings on this

 

[gregglarkin]

Re: Any strong opinions on Custom Menus(tasks) in E1 as opposed to EnterpriseOne Menu and Favorites

Sholberg

The out of the box JDE menus are a good example, but are not the end all be all. Our menus are 100% custom.

Also, do a search on this forum for a lively debate on allowing the use of favorites. Not to stir up the flame war again, but you need to know about the downside of favorites. If an enduser makes themselves a favorite, and the company then decides to create a custom version of that app and hide the original choice in the menu, that change will NOT be reflexed in the favorites. The risk is that the end-user could have a collection of obsolete versions in their list. Short of the CNC wiping out everyone's favorites periodically, there is not a lot that the CNC can do to manage the favorites menu.

Personally I love the favorites menu. I have four apps that I use constantly to administer the system that I have in my favorites list. But as a policy, we did not allow favorites for the end user because of the risk of obsolete stuff. Let the Flame war begin...

 

[altquark]

Re: Any strong opinions on Custom Menus(tasks) in E1 as opposed to EnterpriseOne Menu and Favorites

I'm going to say that for in-depth true ERP processing, at a larger corporation - you need to somewhat control what processes are being run. Creating task views and menus with your custom objects/custom versions and standard JDE applications is usually the "done thing". Most customers I work with actually get rid of the standard JDE menus for their end users to eliminate confusion.

[ QUOTE ]

We are about to upgrade to Financials, Purchasing and Equipment Maintenance


[/ QUOTE ]
Now, items on a menu will only appear if a user has PERMISSION to use that item - so the theory stands that a power user (such as an HR or Financials analyst) will "know" what to run. However when you start getting into distribution (purchasing) - and opening the system up to AP clerks etc, you need to give them defined steps so they can do their jobs. Under Xe, I used to see custom menus for end users with icons with the pictorial "1", "2", "3" etc next to them - identifying what process to run first....

 

[klwong]

Re: Any strong opinions on Custom Menus(tasks) in E1 as opposed to EnterpriseOne Menu and Favorites

Clients generally like to control the appearance of the menus they present to their users. Not just the content, but the order.

Also, as stated above, when there are custom versions used, as there are for many tasks, custom menus are the best way to get your custom versions into the mix, and in common use.

I'm with your consultants. I've never done an implementation without using custom menus.

As for the burden, it's true that you'll have some annoyances as you learn to promote them with OMW, but I haven't noticed that the burden is too much after going live.

 

[riko44]

Re: Any strong opinions on Custom Menus(tasks) in E1 as opposed to EnterpriseOne Menu and Favorites

Complexity of CNC work depends on how do you handle menus promotions.

I normally promote entire Task View (we have few custom task Views)
You can create OMW project for each tasks view (Lets say TASKV_12345, TASKV_234567, etc) , and add particular task view (object type = SE_TASK) into this project with 'All Inclusive' option .

Make sure that activity rules are setup for your project promotion in OM configuration.
I setup OMW rules for SE_REL, SE_RULE, SE_TASK, SE_VAR and MENU Object Types, although some of these could be redundant..
For example 21->26 SE_REL activity rule is setup as 'Control Tables - Test' -> 'Control Tables - CRP'

Once you setup the project and OMW rules, promotion changes to PD are very simple. Developer/Consultant makes a change in DV menus , then CNC promote project with corresponding task view to Production via OMW (21->…whatever…..>38). No Package build/outage is needed, so promotion can take just 5-10 minutes depending on the Task View size . You may want to refresh cache on the JAS servers if changes are needed immideately.

This approach could be risky, since you are promoting entire Task View (with all changes / fine cuts etc). Potentially you can promote some changes that not yet tested. Nevertheless for us it turned out to be more practical then promoting changes on the task level. You can definitely do some testing in PY the same way it is done for regular objects.

 

[riko44]

Re: Any strong opinions on Custom Menus(tasks) in E1 as opposed to EnterpriseOne Menu and Favorites

BTW I am not sure why you can't use custom menus AND favorites ...

 

[Solutionkid]

Re: Any strong opinions on Custom Menus(tasks) in E1 as opposed to EnterpriseOne Menu and Favorites

Custom menus, customer defined versions, the only way to go. Favorites never been a "favorite" of mine, but I can understand the appeal to the user.

 

[Boris G]

Re: Any strong opinions on Custom Menus(tasks) in E1 as opposed to EnterpriseOne Menu and Favorites

Definitely Custom Menus and Favorites. I've just written a blog entry on how to secure out all the vanilla task views, leaving just Custom and Favorite menus:

http://www.mlbig.com/securing-task-views

 

[Terry DeMoure]

Re: Any strong opinions on Custom Menus(tasks) in E1 as opposed to EnterpriseOne Menu and Favorites

I would probably be branded a hypocrite on my opinion. Back when I was on XE Fat Client , I used to look at previews of 8.10-8.11 on html and you would see glee on my face and hear my "oohs" and "aahs" as I witnessed it demonstrated, resembling a kid in a candy store window. Then when I finally experienced html on 8.11, this kid discovered more sour than sweet.

I do miss Solution Explorer and the old menu structures because I could whiz through them quickly and interactive & batch version could even be designed into the menus to be the natural order of processing within the business processes. But then again, I did not have the Favorites to go through a short list of choices when I hopping all around the modules.

Hmmm...I wish the poll in this forum discussion had a middle ground because I think I would like to have the best of both worlds...not just OneWorld. (bad pun? lol)

 

[DRezanka]

Re: Any strong opinions on Custom Menus(tasks) in E1 as opposed to EnterpriseOne Menu and Favorites

Custom. We intertwined our Role development with our Task definition. It makes it much easier to support. Because IT support has access to all menus, knowing what Role the user uses can easily lead the Support person to the Tasks they are using.

Custom menus do not make it any easier or harder to manage Task promotions. It's still a pain if you only want to promote a subset of the Task View.

 

[Luke Phillips]

Re: Any strong opinions on Custom Menus(tasks) in E1 as opposed to EnterpriseOne Menu and Favorites

I would agree with Doug. ALLOut promote the use of role based menus because it makes managing security simpler. Whether the tasks themeselves are custom or not makes little difference to IT maintenance overhead in our experience. This is one of the reasons we allow for menu maintenance from spreadsheets.

www.ALLOutSecurity.com