The Infor OS Platform continues to evolve, and staying current with the latest features and capabilities is essential for developers and technical professionals. This comprehensive guide breaks down the key updates and enhancements introduced in the October 2024 release.
To see these key updates in action, watch our comprehensive "What's New in the Infor OS Platform in the October 2024 Release" recorded webinar:
Infor Process Intelligence
Infor Process Intelligence is a complete business process solution that adopts standard industry specific process models, extends it to fit your specific needs and monitors the execution to identify areas of improvement. It is comprised of the Process Viewer and Process Modeler, and new in 2024.10: Process Mining (available as a separate add-on which requiring an additional subscription).
Process Modeler:
Extends the industry specific business process models with your own content and improves the adoption of the organization’s documented processes.
Mass approve/draft models in folder: Introducing capability to mass approve or mass draft the diagrams based on multi-selection identified by the user at the same time.
Cut/copy/paste registry entries: Ability to cut, copy, and paste registry entries across categories.
Folder content sequencing and document generator using sequencing: A field called “Sequence” has been added in the designer mode. This “Sequence” field, once enabled, will allow the user to sequence the folders and diagrams as per the requirement.
Visual comparison two versions of a BPMN model: Introducing the ability to compare two versions of the same BPMN diagram.
Process Mining:
A new feature, available separately, that assesses the performance of your business processes and benchmarks across the organization or industry peers. Mining identifies opportunities and continuously improves ensuring conformance and compliances against the prescribed model.
Metadata (events, attributes) definitions and translations: Introducing data definition module to capture meta data and maintain the required relationship mapping. Also, utilizes the registry capability to capture all the events and its translation.
Flexible data load options: Dynamic data load management options to analyze multiple processes, based on the subscription tier of customer, at the same time.
Build, visualize, and analyze business processes: To build layout of widgets on a page and effectively use the widget to analyze the business process data, Mining introduces its insights designer that offers a variety of widgets to analyze.
Filter capability to slice and dice process data: In order to identify the root cause of a bottleneck in a business process, introduces filter capability using attribute, event, process flow, flow chart and end, pre-defined metrics, date range and event occurrence allowing user to slide and dice data.
Conformance analysis: Mining contains a conformance widget that enables the user to map the captured events from the underlying system to the defined business process thus enabling the user to visualize the non-conforming events.
Generate BPMN model based on one or more process events: Ability to generate BPMN model from the variant explorer widget, where one or more variants can be used to generate the BPMN model.
Industry benchmark comparison: Provides industry benchmarks that can be used to put process or sub-process cycle times into perspective.
Infor Birst
Infor Birst is a cloud business intelligence and analytics platform that helps organizations optimize processes in less time than a traditional BI. CloudSuite Analytics is a pre-built Analytics solution with an industry focus that comes from Infor CloudSuite solutions. It offers a valuable starting point to organizations by providing reports, dashboards, and a data model built with Birst.
Send Notifications as part of a Workflow: Determining the set time each morning to send daily reports can prove challenging since data processing time is often unknown. Users can now send notifications as part of the workflow, so that a report is always sent after the data refresh is completed.
Additional time options for notifications: Users have expressed interest in flexibility when it comes to how often a notification is sent. As a result, new options have been added that include Start and End and how often. For example, every other week instead of every week.
Gradient Style Conditional Formatting: Previously, the only way to show gradient style formatting was with manual conditional formatting that required syntax and query creation. Starting with Heat Maps, customers can now select multiple colors and Birst will automatically apply gradients according to the buckets in the data.
Infor OS Portal
Infor OS Portal offers a single-app blended experience to the customers that provides simplified navigation to all their Infor applications, streamlined workflows and Workspaces that deliver relevant data and content.
Increase number of allowed Insight Groups: Previously, users were limited to three insight groups. This has been increased from 3 public and 3 private to 6 public and 6 private groups.
Admin UI Improvements Workspace Settings: Currently there is not flexibility to enable or disable features on a widget or workspace. Infor has introduced a new dialog for workspace features that can be used to enable or disable specific features in a widget on a workspace. Features can be defined in the workspace JSON, configured in Portal Admin and checked by a widget using an API.
Reordering of General Settings: Users have had trouble locating the setting needed, due to the increasing number of settings, so now the general settings have been split up into 5 different sections: General, Navigation Bar, Workspace, Smart Panel, and Widget settings.
Workspace Backgrounds: Introducing a new feature that allows users to customize the background of their workspace. Allows users to upload an image for the workspace background, select from a range of predefined backgrounds, ability to add company branding, and admin setting available to enable or disable end users.
Multiselect when Deleting Bookmarks: A new checkbox will appear when the user hovers over the bookmark. There is a new delete icon in the top toolbar that will delete any checked bookmarks.
New Mobile Smart Panel: New redesigned smart panel now turned into a slide up drawer. This new smart panel will be hidden as a default and a new icon top right. User can close smart panel using icon.
Infor ION (Intelligent Open Network)
Infor ION (Intelligent Open Network) is an interoperability and business process management platform (iPaaS) designed to integrate applications, people, processes and data to run your business.Infor ION enables Infor and customer activities to configure a routed infrastructure, setup workflows, design and activate business event monitors and manage the tasks and alerts through."
Kafka Connector: Infor has added a native Kafka connector to send and receive data to/from cloud-based Kafka (Confluent, Amazon). The adapter supports two (read=consume and write=produce) scenarios.
New OneView UI: The UI of OneView is redesigned using the Angular. A new timeline look, search, and filtering functionality is added to improve user experience. The new OneView UI includes new filters and “Save Search” functionality. Confirm BOD page included in new OneViewUI.
Sending ION Process Data to Data Lake: It is now possible to send ION Process Data (workflows, tasks, alerts, notifications) to Data Lake.
Infor Data Fabric
For enterprises in want of becoming data-driven organizations with goals of wrangling information to make effective and timely decisions, the Data Fabric is a cohesive data strategy that helps accelerate data-to-insights. Data Fabric is a powerful cloud-based data integration platform that enables organizations to connect, integrate, and analyze their data from various sources in real-time.
Data Security: As part of Data Fabric Security framework, Infor is introducing a Data Security feature providing admins with the ability to manage user’s data access permissions. Provides object and property-level access ensuring fine-grained control over sensitive information in a record. Users start without access to data until given security roles with the necessary data security permission.
Security: Show Provisioned Roles by Default: Administrative and platform-level Infor Security roles that come standard with CloudSuite and Infor OS will now be presented within Data Fabric Security by default. The following roles will now be listed in Data Fabric Security without requiring administrators to manually add them: DATAFABRIC-SuperAdmin, DATAFABRIC-User, Infor-SystemAdministrator, MingleAdministrator
Stream Pipelines Support for Snowflakes Destination: As part of the Stream Pipelines feature, Infor has added new support for Snowflake destinations providing native connectivity for seamless data transfer. Stream Pipelines integrates with Snowflake Streaming technology to provide immediate data transfer directly to Snowflake labels.
Configuration Management: Local Packages and Tagging for Stream Pipelines: Through Customer Self-Service Portal, the Configuration Management feature now supports exporting and importing Stream Pipeline content by manual selection or by using Tagging.
Infor Artificial Intelligence
Infor AI is a complete ensemble of tools for creating, managing, and deploying AI models for enterprise use cases. Enterprises leverage on multiple machine-learning algorithms and optimization solvers, coupled with supplementary intelligence technologies and knowledge-engineered human and business logic with the aim of maximizing sales, reducing costs, boosting efficiency, and uncovering valuable insights. The AI core focus is to create value through predictive and prescriptive analytics and advise on the most efficient business decisions.
Incremental ML Model Training & Models Library: ML models can be retrained using only the latest data increment, by supplying the previously trained model to the retraining and pertaining the knowledge from the initial data. A library of saved trained models is available to choose from and apply as a warm start for the incremental training. This feature is available for models trained with custom algorithms.
Scripting Activity Enhancements: The Scripting activity can accept four data inputs and output four result datasets. With this possibility, users can handle complex data processing tasks more efficiently, with the eliminated need for involving multiple Scripting activities.
Pythion Libraries Management in ML Custom Algorithms: Implementation of a user-driven, on-demand approach that allows for selective addition of libraries for each custom algorithm. By enabling users to specify which libraries are needed and installing them only when required, this approach can reduce the Docker image size and improves the flexibility and efficiency of managing dependencies.
Optimization Usability Enhancements: A range of improvement that streamline user experience have been implemented. Independent concurrent executions of design and production quests are now possible. Additionally, real-time activity logs and comprehensive audit information are provided to users for better visibility and control over the execution. Tooltip messages have been added for immediate contextual assistance, ensuring users have the information they need at their fingertips.
Multiple Result Files from Optimization Models: Users can define multiple result files as outputs in their custom algorithms. These outputs are accessible for post-processing through scripting or other activities. The data can further be ingested into the Data Lake for downstream analysis and visualizations and can also be downloaded to the local system for additional examination.
Overview Pages Alignment with IDS Standards: IDS standard cards have been implemented to ensure a cohesive user experience across the platform and other Infor OS products. The previous “Add” card placeholder has been replaced with a button in the top toolbar that offers the same functionality. The implementation approach also facilitates easier integration and adoption of IDS components in the future.
Pre-installed Python Libraries Updates: The pre-installed Python libraries for the Custom Algorithms and the Scripting activity have been upgraded to newer version. Updates are performed to maintain the security and performance of the Artificial Intelligence application, where these libraries are utilized.
Infor GenAI
The Infor GenAI is a generative AI platform part of Infor OS that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable applications, including third-party applications, to utilize generative AI capabilities. GenAI assists users with tasks such as data and text generation, summarization, translation, contextualization, and analysis.
Infor GenAI – Embedded Experience: The Infor GenAI service allows direct access to LLMs exposed via APIs. The adopting applications can use LLM to provide the business context as the prompt and exposed the model completion as embedded experience or via smart widgets. The integration with LLM can support the use cases around authoring text generation, analysis, and contextualization of provided text and translation which are the base capabilities of LLM.
Assisted Text Generation/Summarization: The creation of the authoring text, translation, or even analysis of provided business context is time consuming and requires specific skills. GenAI exposes the set of LLM APIs to invoke by providing the business context. The results of the LLM – called completion – can be then exposed as an application embedded experience or smart widget. For instance, based on provided properties of the business object, the GenAI solution can create a comprehensive report and even translate it.
LLM Passthrough API and Prompt Playground: It is important to experiment with different LLMs and compare the generated results to refine the created prompt or select the LLMs for integration. This technique is called prompt Engineering. Users can experiment with LLMs in two different interfaces: 1) The LLM Passthrough API is exposed by the GenAI platform through API Gateway and provides access to selected LLMs, and 2) The Prompt Playground is a user interface within the GenAI module built on top of the LLM Passthrough APIs.
GenAI Onboarding Message: An onboarding message visible right after user logs into the tenant, notifying user about the GenAI service available.
Infor RPA (Robotic Process Automation)
Infor RPA allows you to automate the repetitive, high-volume time-consuming tasks, which would be performed by employees and now can be run by the bot or software tools. Infor RPA consists of components you can install on your on-premise device, as well as others, which can be accessed from the Infor OS Portal in the multitenant cloud environment. Among those components, RPA Studio is a desktop automation used to model the RPA flows and RPA Management is the Cloud application to manage the process execution. Automation is the processes allow freeing up employees to focus on more creative and value-adding activities. RPA can lead to significant cost savings by reducing the need for manual labor, minimizing efforts, and improving process efficiency.
AI Driven Text Extraction using IDP Flows in RPA : AI-driven text extraction from business documents refers to the use of artificial intelligence to automatically identify, extract, and interpret relevant text and data from various types of business documents, such as invoices, contracts, and reports. The technology uses the marching learning and GenAI (LA 2024.10) to accurately process and understand the content, enabling businesses to efficiently organize and utilize the extracted information. The AI driven text extraction in RPA is leverage by integrating Infor RPA with Infor Document Processor (IDP) Platform. This solution leavens the Flow Based text extraction for the Business Documents. The integration is possible thanks to the new API endpoints exposed by the IDP. It is supported for multiple language out of the box.
RPA Management UI Updated: The User Interface of RPA Management pages were redesigned to be sleeker and present more useful data to the user. The following pages under Manage category were up-lifted: Device, Robots, Processes, Global Arguments, Authorization, Downloads; and under the monitor view, Automation Tasks.
Copy user arguments values: It is now possible to transfer the User Arguments values from the previous version of the process to the new one. Upon finalizing the new version of the process use “Copy Values from previous version” that essentially copies values of user arguments from the previous finalized version while saving. The Copy Values from previous version functionality previously worked on the process arguments and now also on the user arguments.
Graph activities for SharePoint, OneDrive: Microsoft Office 365 Graph Activities for RPA provide a seamless integration between RPA solution and the Microsoft Office 365 ecosystem. A new set of Microsoft Office 365 Graph Activities was introduced as part of the activities pane – “OneDrive”, as well as “SharePoint”, allowing intersection with OneDrive service of Microsoft 365 and SharePoints Lists.
Infor GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance)
GRC is a solution that monitors an organization’s complex business data against policies based on business objectives and regulatory compliance. Provides timely identification and remediation of violations, in addition to automating the audit process and reducing cost of compliance.
RAF Studio Support: Studio feature is enhanced to allow definition of a new Insight for Risk Framework to apply this for any compliance. Customers can define their own Insight to monitor their business processes or improve their compliance coverage.
GenAI Integration: Leverage GenAI to summarize the information to enable business users with effective decision making. Capability will summarize violation data and comments, assist with adding comments during mitigation, and allow reviewers to view violation summary before approving access.
Infor Mongoose
Infor Mongoose aims to empower organizations to rapidly innovate and transform their operations by providing a low-code, versatile, user-friendly platform for building tailers, scalable applications that drive efficiency, agility, and growth.
Inbound BOD Cleanup: Clean up mechanism within Mongoose to delete old inbound BODs. User can add a scheduled cleanup process to remove item.
Expression Editor Breadcrumbs: Provides visual clues, including a view of the overall expression to help clarify where the user is, and makes editing Expressions more user friendly by adding the containing expression to the UI of nested expressions.
PurgeHistoryData Event Handler to BGTaskHistory Records: The Application Event System (AES) will be used to call the PurgeHistoryData event handler to clean up BGTaskHistory records in the database. This enhances the existing PurgeHistoryData event handler to purge BGTaskHistory records in an efficient batched fashion, which is aware of the process being run on multiple sites within an MT cloud environment, automated daily using the AES.
Mongoose IDS Realignment Phase 1: For identified inconsistencies, enhancements will be applied against Mongoose controls to achieve IDS UI compliance. Updates have been made to the default theming and control details to align with IDS.
Enhancement for External App Parameters Form: This new feature aims to support the development of an automation tool meant to help verify the configuration of Birst Integration Environments. It enhances the External App Parameters form to enable easier automation.
New Core Infrastructure for Process Mining: This new feature adds Process Mining infrastructure to Mongoose core to support mining events and processing.
Add Flex Layout Header to New Notebook Tabs as Dropdown Feature: New flex header added to the new notebook tabs dropdown feature providing a flex layout in this header area which can then be edited.
Prevent Customer from Deleting Required Vendor Startup Methods: IsSystemRecord column will be used to stop Infor delivered StartupMethods from being deleted. Enhanced the StartupMethods structure to allow designation of base or vendor and disallow customer deletions of such rows.
Selective Regeneration of Audit Triggers: This enhancement discusses how to regenerate audit triggers for tables with schema changes only. Adds an option to selectively regenerate audit triggers.
Smart Client Removal: The smart client will no longer be supported. The windows smart client, WinStudio.exe, has been deprecated but is still part of the on-prem Setup.exe. The WinStudio.exe is being replaced with the stub that documents the retirement of the smart client. By only having to manage one client, the web client will receive more designs, features, and bug fixes.
Improve Widget Rendering Times and Concurrency: When multiple Mongoose forms were loaded as home page widgets, performance could slow at times. This enhancement architects a better shared session initialization and parallel processing improving responsiveness and overall user experience when using multiple Mongoose widgets in workspaces and dashboard scenarios.
Infor OS App Designer
Infor OS App Designer is a no-code/low-code application development platform primarily used to build Widgets for OS Portal Workspaces.
Data Lake Wizard – Edit JSON Dialog: New feature allowing addition of an edit JSON dialog to Data Lake advanced query page. This allows to user to modify the JSON schema or output.
Use Expressions in Parameters: In cases where the user could bind data to parameters, there were only options for variables or static values. Infor has added the ability for users to use the Expression Editor to bind expressions in the following settings: Go-to button action settings, edit parameters, and refresh settings.
Mongoose First Class Connector: Creating Mongoose Data Services proved quite challenging without knowledge of Mongoose REST API endpoints and JSON schema. As a results, a new Data Service wizard for Mongoose IDOs has been added that allows easy IDO selection by project and by configuration, allows users to select from a list of IDO properties, and ability to add input parameters with SQL-style query builder. This will streamline the development of data services that retrieve data from Mongoose applications, enhancing ease of use for the end users.
New Data Service Data Types: Added the ability for the Data Service wizard to show the existing data type based on the swagger documentation and let the user choose a different type. Types include integer, decimal, Boolean, string, and date-time. The user can now change how their data is presented, such as in cases where a decimal is communicated by the API, but only an integer is relevant.
Infor EPM (Enterprise Performance Management)
Infor EPM is an enterprise performance management solution that integrates financial planning, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and analytics to help organizations enhance decision-making and improve business performance.
Financial Consolidation Improvements: Improvements across several modules of Financial Consolidation have been implemented including ability to create custom Sequences, UX enhancements for reporting and journal managements, performance improvements, and API enhancements. The upcoming release focuses on Business Objects selection panes, harmonization of Group and Company cash flow reports, and improvements in transaction currency balances entry.
Financial Reporting application: Introducing a brand-new financial reporting application that offers a pre-delivered set of critical financial statements and an optional list of over 30 financial KPIs, providing a comprehensive overview of your organization's financial state.
Self-Service Enhancements: New Self-Service Financial Reporting enhancements bringing highly requested ability to export reports to Excel with having similar look and feel between source report (in web) and output to MS Excel. Infor has also introduced new Application Studio action which can take the context (current data cube, year, version, etc) and open Self-Service report with the selected data viewpoint to continue data analysis using ad-hoc features.
OLAP Server Enhancements: The save operation has been adjusted so it can be executed parallel with other read operations, such as financial data retrieval, dimension structure reads, MDX requests to get data from OLAP cubes and export operations. This means improvements in the application response and performance, especially during reporting cycles. Additionally, the new version removes the ability to add new OLAP Accelerators as well as the ability to switch the calculation engine between current and former modes. Customers that use former engine today can enable that functionality using EPM Toggle by reaching out to Infor Support.
Application Studio Enhancements: To make chart colors dynamic, Infor has introduced feature to setup those colors using references to the Application Studio cells or variables. EPM team brought continue refactoring application to improve performance for various scenarios and enhance logging for better analysis when required.
Application Engine Enhancements: Introducing a new B# type SQLReader to read relational data in batches without overwhelming the memory. That change together with continuous refactoring of Application Engine improves the application performance and stability.
Framework Updates: Introduced certified support of Infor OS LTR for on-premise environments of Infor EPM.
General: Adoption of Alabaster color scheme for EPM applications.
Infor IDP (Infor Document Processor)
Inhouse solution that provides pre and post extraction services, extraction, and analysis of text. has a dedicated user interface. IDP is bundled with Infor Robotic Process Automation.
Infor IDP: Infor has built IDP with AWS Textract and GenAI (LA) capabilities to be a part of our Infor Ecosystem for Text Extraction capabilities. The solution was developed by Infor to work with Infor Ecosystem and is highly AI driven. IDP is a powerful platform to deal with any type of business document integrated out of the box with Infor RPA.
Infor IDP Application: Infor IDP exposed the new User Interface as part of the Infor OS portal under the name Document Processor. There user can try-out the pre-build IDP flow for the AI driven text extraction from business documents, view the detailes of the Pre-Build IDP flows and review the list of the submitted job(s) for the document text extraction. The following IDP is provisioned as part of the plafrom:
- Infor Invoice Classification Pre Build DF – is designed to efficiently retrieve document types, entities, or both, streamlining the process of information extraction and analysis.
Infor IDM (Infor Document Management)
Infor Document Management (IDM) is centralized repository that can store, generate, and manage documents within an organization. IDM simplifies business processing by providing documents in-context along with sophisticated search capabilities, making it easy to find documents and related information within ERPs and Infor OS applications.
Partial Data Refresh: This capability allows users to select which document types/documents to clone/refresh detaching from Infor OS and refreshing at the application level.
Scripting Functionality: Scripting functionality in IDM Output means users can build strings, math formulas, and build logic into XPath, where they can build repeaters.
A full list of new features, bugs fixed, and other documentation can be found on the Infor Support Portal. Learn more about Infor OS here or contact us anytime.
Don't see a feature you want? Log into the Infor Support Portal and click on Cases > Create Case. You can enter your own and respond to others.
To view the recent October 2024 Infor OS Platform What’s New, visit our Youtube site. For more information on product updates, please see the release training that is available to customers on InforU Campus site.
