Posts Tagged ‘Epicor’
E4SE 8.2 – Service Pack 13
The E4SE 8.2 Service Pack 13 was released on 2015/12/10. The following is extracted from the included Release Notes. This post only includes update information from Service Pack 13. Please refer to the documentation for previous updates and more detailed information.
GLOBAL UPDATES
Certification
- Certification of Epicor Financials 7.4 SP7.
- Certification of SQL Server 2014™. Base E4SE is certified but not Business Intelligence.
- Certification of Epicor Financials 7.3.6 SP5 EP1.
- Certification of Epicor Portal with SQL 2014.
E4SE Customizations; installation made easy and fast!
Since the first day I started developing E4SE (Epicor for Service Enterprises by Epicor) with ICE 1.x, I always wondered why we would be expected to rebuild a site(s) to install customizations. Particularly when you had many sites and when you might only have a few files to update.
At the time, I was working on a project where the customer had 10+ E4SE sites. Each time they rebuilt the sites it would take 15-20 minutes each (this is using hardware of 5 years ago). At that rate, it was taking several hours.
This is when I decided to spend a few hours of my own to build the E4SE Customization Installer. This has since been redesigned with additional features. Without having to completely rebuild the site(s), installing customizations became easy and super fast. We are talking about seconds!
Many if not all the customizations I performed, I never insisted the customer use the Site Builder unless there was a specific need. If they wanted to, I would deploy the customization(s) into a CAB file for the site builder. However, many customers liked the fact that the downtime was limited to a few minutes at most using the custom installer.
The E4SE Customization Installer is a simple interface that performs the minimum tasks of:
- XCOPY custom/new files into selected E4SE site(s)
- Perform IISRESET (optional) to clear all loaded objects in order for the update to take place
- Run GenDescriptors (optional) in order for E4SE to acknowledge new items and allow menu and security assignments.
Screenshots Read the rest of this entry »
My first look at Customizing Epicor 9.0x with ICE 2.x
Being an Epicor Enterprise guy for over 12 years, I never got my hands on the manufacturing side of things. I recently spent a few days reviewing and reading the ICE customization user guides. These guides are some of the best …actually “the best”… Epicor has ever published! They are a very good read for performing most of the common client interface changes, new reports, dashboards, and other light customizations for non-developers.
Here are my initial thoughts/observations:
- The client interface customization workbench (Customization Tools Dialog) reminds me allot of FrontOffice/Clientele customizations. I always like the Clientele way of doing customization as you totally eliminate the manual deployment of customization to every desktop. Development of customizations can be performed on any client (in most cases) and then simply submitted to the main repository. A user logs onto their client and voila the customizations are refreshed into their environment. It couldn’t be easier!
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Properties Editor
The Customization Tools Dialog is very similar to Visual Studio development environment when it comes to looking at form objects and reviewing/setting their properties. Documentation is a little light or non-existent on some of the properties of the various object types.
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Script Editor
The Customization Tools Dialog script editor is one of my least favorite. NO INTELLISENSE! If IntelliSense was available it would save us time to having to refer to the object model that we are working with or adding.
- Customizing Reports is quite easy. In just a few steps you can add new data to any report and of course your company logo. I really like that the Crystal Report data connection is to an XML file. Epicor 9.0x generates these XML file when running a report. If you’ve changed the data model for a report by adding new fields and ran the report, the XML document contains these new fields. Refresh the data connection in Crystal and the new field is available. Now I still need to look at report implementations using stored procedures.
- Core BAQs do not exist. Having to modify certain BAQs require a complete rewrite.
Again these are my first impressions/thoughts. I have yet to perform extensive customizations/changes.
If anyone has anything to add please let me know.
My next post will be with the ICE 2.x SDK for performing more in-depth customizations and to create new applications. Sometimes you can use it for simple things too! Such as, adding a parameter to an existing core report without having to recreate the BAQ manually.
Epicor Perspective 2009
Caesars Palace Las Vegas here we come!
I’m very excited about the opportunity to attend Perspectives 2009, Epicor’s Global User Conference, scheduled for November 8-10, 2009. There will be multiple days of hands-on education, networking with industry peers, and over 500 sessions to choose from. The conference offers content directly applicable to my work on the (insert: project(s) or initiatives you are working on) and will allow me to network with a number of Epicor product experts and over 2000 Epicor users. Many of the technical presentations cover how to reduce costs, increase ROI and deal with compliance issues.
Click here to learn more and hope to see you there.
