Lawson printing

youre hosted, so that pretty much eliminates "easy". You can "print" to a network share but Im not sure how much more that gets you than you already have. I understand the concern on the maintenance f the printers but printing in LBI is not as complicated as Lawson but at the same time is not as robust, feature-wise. You can set up printers as a device and those devices can be assigned to users. You then can burst to the printers.

if any of this sounds remotely like what youre looking for let me know and I can expound.

I believe we are suggesting the same path for a solution. Our host will load the printers for us on the Lawson server using the printer name as it exists on our network, manufacturer & model, print server, IP address of printer and / or print server, name for Lawson printer list. Then we setup who has access to which printers/devices. While this might not seem a big deal we're talking many dozens of printers, with all variation of drivers, and literally hundreds of users .. not just to setup but also maintain going forward. This is in addition to all the other Lawson security setup and maintenance. Just wondered if there was a better option?

unfortunately thats the cost of bursting, whether its to email addresses or printers, youve got to set up all those dependencies. There is an import mechanism that can be used and leveraging any ETL tool you can automate the generation of an xml file. at that point all you need do is upload the file ever-so-often.

Alternatively you could just print all reports to one printer but that probably wouldnt be of much use. For me personally, I would question why people need to the reports printed in the first place. There is very little, if anything, that I can see a user needing to do with a hard copy of a report that they cant do with a soft copy, not to mention the cost of ink, paper and storage space to keep these reports. in fact, a hard copy limits the user quite a bit, particularly in the realm of sharing information, doing calculations and taking action on the information, which is a core principal of good a Business Intelligence platform.

but ill get off my soap box as I also understand that culture in an organization often trumps best practices.

"I would question why people need to the reports printed in the first place."

This.

Oh how I agree with you. Some of that culture of wanting hard copies may change over time as people build confidence in the Lawson system, but for some old habits die very hard. Example .. I know I personally am not investing in Fed Saving Bonds anymore because they no longer offer a paper printed EE or I bond .. but I find that totally justified as I don't trust the Fed not to lose the electronic receipt. Trust is huge .. even in business.

We had a similar situation but we have worked with users to email the reports directly to them after the reports are being bursted. They are happy with this solution.

The bursting to email devices and setting up each user's email as a delivery device may be a bit tedious but it helps with users who do not want to login and print a report. Maybe you can sell this idea to the users to see whether this will help them.

I agree with Matt though that why do users have to print reports when everything is available to them electronically.

Thanks Ruma. Emailing is something I hadn't considered oddly enough but might be accepted by some of the user community in this case. The Exchange Admin might not be too happy with me though. ;-)

Actually when you are setting up users with email devices you are not asking for any of the exchange admin's help. You can set up each user indiviually with their email address as a different delivery device and when you burst this report you can output it to all users that have access to the report. You will be doing this independently of the exchange admin.

It is when you want to se up a group of users then you can set them up as one group email that you will need your exchange admin's help. You then set this up as a single email delivery device on LBI. Once the exchange admin has set up this group, you can add or remove users to this group.

Matt, I've been struggling with bursting a report to print to a network printer for a few weeks now. No errors in the systemout log and when I run the command on the server it prints to the printer. I've worked with Infor on it and even support isn't sure why it isn't printing, also asked them for a step by step on setting up a network printer device as they keep saying permissions or adobe version 7 needs to be installed, which can't happen. I can see it's trying to do a shell print so maybe there's something on the server that's blocking this type of silent printing. Any help would be great, also whomever posted the printing zip file it throws an error trying to open it.
Best -Darren