Welcome to The Water Cooler

With the New Year advancing, this is a good time to check in on our resolutions to make things better.

At Infor, our resolution is to make your ability to do business easier, faster, and better by providing you with knowledge at your fingertips.

With The Water Cooler, we will be acting on that resolution by providing you with quarterly updates applying to your Infor SunSystems product: highlights, tips & tricks, information pertaining to our top Knowledge Base articles, Infor technology, strategy, questions (provided by you) and answers (provided by us) and much, much more. .

Sharing our vision … Let's chat

A note from the Infor SunSystems Director of Product Management, James Chisham

The past 18 months have seen a number of key developments and product enhancements for Infor SunSystems. Most notably the 6.2 release was an important milestone in delivering a fully Unicode-enabled version of the software. Infor SunSystems has always been a solution that can easily and quickly respond to unique business requirements—whether requirements are language, currency, management reporting, statutory reporting, or special accounting treatments.

Additionally, we have added further core product enhancements, such as the very powerful and rich Extended Analysis module, and the Enterprise Data Management feature. We will continue to deliver core enhancements to the software and a consumer-grade user experience using technology innovation to meet the requirements that our users demand in order to run their businesses. We have outlined below some of the capabilities contained within SunSystems 6.2 and why we believe this is a release to support your finance function and business into the future and secure your product investment.

I would also like to talk about a couple of new areas features that you may not be aware of that we are also delivering in the near future to build on the successes we are already seeing with the 6.2 release. One of the areas that many SunSystems customers talk about is the ability to store documents with transactional records in SunSystems; Purchase Orders/Sales Orders, contract documentation etc. With the Version 6 product line we are about to launch our integration with Infor Document Management (IDM), Infor Document Management is an integration platform and a repository for business documents and content. In industry terms it is a Document Management system, or Content Management system, that lets you get access to your business documents, in-context, at all times. With the integration we are delivering with SunSystems this means documents can be attached to journals, customers, suppliers and order/invoice transactions all in-context to the record you are working on. This means SunSystems customers can manage the whole lifecycle of your business documents, from input through storage, retrieval and sharing and find documents by searching for them using an attribute-based search or free-text search.

Another new initiative that we are looking to introduce is the advent of Web Portals with SunSystems. A common request we see is the ability to surface information to external users, and indeed internal users of SunSystems. Therefore providing secure web access to Customer or Suppliers to support to surface certain SunSystems data. An example being for a customer to log into the portal to see a listing of all orders and their statuses. This will give both internal and external users access to SunSystems data, without the need for them to be a fully-fledged user. The advent of the portal in SunSystems will be our first pass in delivering some initial B2B and B2C web capabilities. With the delivery of SunSystems on the web this will be an exciting new feature for our customers to consider. We will be issuing more details on this new functionality in due course, so please keep up to date with these notices or contact your Infor representative for more details.

Finally, one of the great features of SunSystems has been the delivery of simple and powerful ad-hoc querying and reporting delivered by Q&A (Query & Analysis) or Vision as many of our customers would know it as. This has been a key feature of our solution of many years. As technology has advanced and I.T departments push to move to more contemporary operating systems and versions of Office, there has been a strong call for Q&A to be offered in 64-bit Office environments. Many customers may be aware that we have recently introduced our next generation of Q&A reporting, Q&A Evolve. This new member of the Q&A family has been introduced to meet the need of these requirements and offers users a 64-bit Office capability. At the same time the product has been re-factored and is being developed to encompass some of the BI (Business Intelligence) capabilities that Infor offers, and this version will support the use of Dashboards, which will deliver a web and mobility version of Q&A queries in a very visual and consumer focused fashion. We are offering customers the opportunity to take advantage of some of the benefits of Q&A Evolve, by allowing the concurrent operation of Q&A 10 and Q&A Evolve, which gives customers time to evaluate and plan a move to this newer version in their own time. Again we would like to share more information on this important release with you and as we use this forum and other mediums to do so, in the meantime please feel free to contact Product Management or your Infor representative and we will be happy to talk to you.

Best regards.

James Chisham
Director, Product Management SunSystems, Infor

The above reflects the direction Infor may take with regard to the specific product(s) described in this document, all of which is subject to change by Infor in its sole discretion, with or without notice to you. This document is not a commitment to you in any way and you should not rely on this document or any of its content in making any decision. Infor is not committing to develop or deliver any specified enhancement, upgrade, product or functionality, even if such is described in this document. Infor is in no way committing to the development or delivery of any specified enhancement, upgrade, product or functionality.

Top Knowledge Base Articles

As voted on by the SunSystems User Community

You must be logged into Infor Xtreme in order to view. Don't have a login to Infor Xtreme? Request one here or through your contact administrator. Click on the below links to be taken directly to the KB article.

	Stop the presses! I got an error message – "Integrity Failure 004"
	What is the difference between the V, I and D markers for Fixed Assets entries in the Ledger Entry?
	What is the process for requesting Serialisation (a license key)?
	Ledger revaluation and conversion rates – which types are recommended?
	What is the latest version of SunSystems?

Did you know ….?

….that SunSystems v6.2 is the latest version, includes a brand new module for Extended Analysis and Financials Calendars functionality and is available in Arabic (Right-To-Left)? See kb 1547068 for full details.

That this release delivers significant architectural improvements and new core functionality including a new module extending the relevance of SunSystems in our global markets and new and existing industry verticals. We also build on our Infor 10x compliant deliveries extending the capabilities that utilize both Infor ION and Infor Ming.le™.

Release Deliverables Include, but are not limited to:

Extended Analysis

This is a new module which adds to the multi-dimensional analysis capabilities of SunSystems. This new module gives the users additional flexibility when defining their business analysis requirements. It enables an extensive range of new custom analysis fields to be made available to each Ledger Analysis dimension. These are completely user defined giving the users the capability to build their analysis in a structure suitable for their needs regardless of their business sector or market location. For example if you had an analysis dimension called Project and analysis code Project 1 you can now extend the analysis to include project start date, expected end date, number of phases and project location.

Enterprise Data Management – (EDM)

Provide SunSystems users the opportunity at a Business Unit level to copy key static data to nominated Business Units. This data encompasses Chart of Accounts, Customers, Suppliers, Items, Currency Rates and for the first time you will be able to define rules to send specific sections of the data to the receiving business units to give you greater control over the transfer of your static data. The data is copied automatically to the receiving business units by newly defined SunSystems Business Object Documents (BODs). For example, if you wish to have a consistent chart of account number for the profit and loss and balance sheet accounts, you can set up the rule so that every time a new profit and loss code is entered into the master business unit, it will automatically be issued to all nominated business units.

Browser-based Functionality

As well as the core product that became web enabled in SunSystems 6 you can now access the following over the web: Security Web console, Data Description Editor and Transfer Desk. The Security Web Console (formally known as User Manager) is essential for effective deployment in cloud and browser-based environments. There have also been Web Client improvements to ensure robust performance and this along with enhanced system security enables SunSystems web server to scale vertically, and this in turn enables a greater number of sessions to be supported on a more powerful server.

Financial Calendars

Financial Calendars give the users the optional ability to have centralized control over setting up financial calendars, financial years and assigning periods and dates to these calendars. You will also be able to assign the calendars to specific business units. The financials calendars will manage the current and open period and date ranges for each business unit.

This new functionality sits at the Domain level above business units and business unit groups. This gives you the flexibility to apply the calendars across all or just some business units in an implementation.

One Calendar contains many years and can apply to multiple Business Units. Each year has a start date and end date and can contains a number of periods.

Years can have different lengths if required, to cater for changes to the company year-end brought about by changes such as takeovers.

Periods have start & end dates. These can be automatically generated or manually entered. There are three types of period: Standard, Adjustment & Year End.

A year must have at least one standard period. It may have one or more optional adjustment periods plus an optional year end period.

Adjustment and Year End periods are always the last periods for a year and the Year End Period is always the last one.

Adjustment & Year End periods always take the last date of the Financial Year.

One Business Unit can have more than one calendar assigned to it, but only one calendar for each year. This allows extended or shortened years to be applied to just one of a number of Business Units that previously shared the same calendar. All years applied for a Business Unit must be contiguous and not overlap dates.

Calendars can be applied to Business Units with existing financial data. These can be applied retrospectively if required provided all the transactions in the system have period numbers that match the calendar's years.

Release Platforms:

• Database server support
  • Microsoft SQL Server (32/64 bit) – 2008R2, 2012
  • Infor will no longer support the Oracle database with the Infor SunSystems 6.2.0 release.
• Application server support
  • Windows Server (64 bit) – 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2
• Windows client support
  • Windows (32/64 bit) 7, 8, 8.1
• Browser client support
  • Internet Explorer – 8, 9, 10, 11
  • Firefox – Latest release
  • Chrome – Latest release
  • Safari – Latest release (OSX only)

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