Infor delivers next step in software: social business applications

Infor delivers next step in software: social business applications

Contextualisation, collaboration and consumerisation are key features of enhanced Infor10 ION Workspace user experience.

Infor, a leading provider of business application software serving more than 70 000 customers, today announced the next generation of Infor10 ION Workspace, an evolutionary step in enterprise software with advanced collaborative and communicative capabilities.

Delivering contextual information in a familiar environment that mirrors social networking tools, the latest release enhances the Workspace user experience, which provides role-based information from multiple applications in a single interface with a common, sleek look and feel to enhance decision-making across the enterprise.

The new Workspace, which was demonstrated today at Inforum, Infor’s annual user conference, provides companies social media-like sharing and communication tools to increase creativity and collaboration, with important protections for sensitive business and customer data in a secure environment. In addition, Workspace helps businesses address the challenge of knowledge transfer across different generations within the workforce by encouraging the sharing of information in a way that is intuitive and familiar to both younger and older generations of workers, including millennials.

“Today’s consumer technology has helped people grow accustomed to communicating with their peers in a way that easily allows them to share information, collect feedback and make decisions,” said Duncan Angove, president of Infor. “This release of Infor10 ION Workspace takes the familiar tools of consumer communication and applies them to the workplace, enabling companies to drive continuous improvement in a more collaborative, productive, social enterprise.”

Generating growth through collaboration

Infor10 ION Workspace provides a social engine for the enterprise, fostering a collaborative environment where users can share information with colleagues in real-time. Users create a profile to represent themselves virtually, and can join public groups, create private groups, comment on posts by others, and follow their colleagues and items that affect key customers, partners, suppliers, vendors, or other designated links in the supply chain.

Relevant, in-context data is pulled from Infor applications, and most non-Infor applications, by Infor10 ION technology and posts to the profiles of users for whom the information is relevant by role in the organisation, enabling them to track key items such as invoices, orders, shipments, and more. Users can also create posts and share them with specific groups, building a platform for multi-dimensional conversation and collaboration with colleagues regardless of location or job-function. Social conversations will be tagged with relevant information to allow for search and retrieval in the future.

Making better decisions with contextual information

ERP and other enterprise applications contain an enormous amount of data, but not all of that data is relevant to everyone in the organisation. Using Infor10 ION technology, Workspace pulls information relevant to a user’s function to enable faster decision-making. With a traditional, siloed application infrastructure, users must log into and search through multiple systems to obtain the data necessary to make an informed business decision. By integrating multiple systems through ION, Infor is able to deliver contextual information to users through Workspace, enabling them to make faster, more informed decisions that increase the speed of business.

Workspace also advances enterprise search capabilities by enabling users to search multiple applications at once, because information aggregated by ION is stored in the ION Business Vault, a repository of business documents from across the enterprise. The ION Business Vault will also store social conversations from Workspace, automatically tagging relevant contextual terms for future retrieval.

Extending consumer technology to enterprise

Infor10 ION Workspace has been designed to mirror familiar social networking tools, making Infor applications among the most intuitive in the business software industry. The latest version of Workspace represents a “consumerisation” of enterprise software, with a sleek look and feel, which is a far cry from the “green screen” roots of ERP. Workspace draws on familiar Web-based applications to extend information contained in the ERP system, such as maps, weather, photographs, and more.

Workspace also helps manufacturers address the critical problem of attracting and energising young workers, particularly millennials. With Workspace, younger generations of workers are able to interact with one another in a way similar to their interpersonal interactions online. They can share and discuss their work with each other in an intuitive, familiar environment, helping to excite them and ignite the creative collaboration that fuels innovation. As people have increasingly come to expect that their social networking platforms draw items like music, pictures and articles in, rather than requiring them to seek out such information, Workspace utilises ION technology to pull data from multiple applications across the enterprise into a single interface that delivers a consumer-grade experience to the user.

“Not since e-mail was first introduced in a business context has a technological development had such potential to change the way that people work as Infor10 ION Workspace,” continued Angove. “Companies that deploy Workspace can hope to achieve levels of collaboration and communication never before seen in the workplace, helping them recruit and retain young talent, excite their workforce, and drive innovation and profitability.”

Customers running an Infor10 family product can deploy Infor10 ION Workspace bundled with Infor10 ION. For more information on Workspace, please visit www.infor.com/company/technology/workspace/.

Infor

Infor is the world’s third-largest supplier of enterprise applications and services, helping more than 70 000 large and mid-size companies improve operations and drive growth across numerous industry sectors. To learn more about Infor, please visit www.infor.com.

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