We are considering buying Design Studio and I'd like to know what this will do for us and how hard the implementation is.
We are on Windows - We are now moving to lsf 9 and are on apps 8.1 moving to apps 9 by May 2010. We are just starting to use process flow professional and may be implementing LBI soon as well.
Will design studio change our lives or just add some bells & whistles that we can live without?
Timing wise, should we wait until after apps 9 before getting design studio?
Thanks for any advice!!
I agree with Terry, it can be a useful tool for both the novice and the expert. It is easy to use to remove fields, change input field to output only etc, but with a little javascript knowledge you can pretty much write small applications within the form.
I have also done a lot of reverse engineering of portal to do many undocumented things, for example I had a client that wanted the Actions in the Inbasket to disappear when an approver made a change on the displayed form approving and only show the actions again when they clicked on the Change button. This was to ensure they did not accidently Approve without commiting the changes Basically anything Lawson does in Portal can be done in Design Studio, they just don't tell you how to do it.
One of the most common changes I have done for clients is to take a form (say like HR11) and create a custom version that included replacing the employee field with a drop down box populating the managers reports to and include that form in Manager Self Service.
The only restriction Design Studio (for formlets) is that it has to be based on an existing form. That being said, in theory you can create a custom form and hide every singe field related to the form to create a new form (but that does defeat part of the purpose of Design Studio).
Gary Davies
www.automated-workflow.com
I am just finishing a project where I took a custom form (custom being it was not a Lawson form, but one written in RPG by another customer). This custom form was being used to create Personal Action Requests by supervisors. I was asked to help out on customizing it after it was written using Design Studio. While looking at it, I thought the concept might be used for another customer for doing projected staffing for the next year. So I took their form and heavily customized it by putting the form inside a Portal page, removing fields, changing labels, and adding a lot of Javascript code for additional editing. When I was finished, you would never think it was the same form. Yet, I'm still using the basic funtionality of the original form. This got me to thinking back to my old programming days in college (more than 30 years ago), when he said "All programs have one or more of the following functions: Add, Change, Delete, Inquire". Which let me to think, if a person was to create a basic form with all the fields available and with those actions, to use as the "engine" - they could probably create a custom form to do just about anything they wanted. I'll try to post an example of the report as a file if I can figure out how....