administrator's guide for ibaan e-service remote 2baansupport.com/docs/baan/administrator guide...

iBaan E-Service Remote 2.1

Administrator's Guide for iBaan E-Service Remote 2.1

A publication of:

Baan Development B.V. P.O.Box 143 3770 AC Barneveld The Netherlands

Printed in the Netherlands

© Baan Development B.V. 2002. All rights reserved.

The information in this document is subject to change without notice. No part of this document may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without the express written permission of Baan Development B.V.

Baan Development B.V. assumes no liability for any damages incurred, directly or indirectly, from any errors, omissions or discrepancies between the software and the information contained in this document.

Document Information

Code: U7891A US Group: User Documentation Edition: A Date: September, 2002

i

Administrator's Guide for iBaan E-Service Remote 2.1

1 iBaan E-Enterprise Suite architecture 1-1 Description 1-1 Design principles 1-1 iBaan E-Enterprise architecture 1-2 Benefits of the architecture 1-2 The use of Microsoft Web tools 1-2 iBaan E-Enterprise technology 1-3 Web server architecture 1-4 Back-office integration architecture 1-5

2 To navigate iBaan E-Enterprise Suite 2-1 E-Common 2-3 E-Service Remote 2-3

3 To administer E-Service Remote 3-1 Basic data 3-2 To set up parameters 3-2 Accept Assignments 3-2 Default Language 3-3 MDSyncAuto 3-3 MD Sync Bus Component 3-3 Process to Baan 3-4 To set up user defaults 3-4 (Re)Generate Client I18N 3-8 Transaction Data 3-10 To maintain transactions 3-10 Successful transactions 3-10 Unsuccessful transactions 3-11 All transactions 3-12

Not processed 3-13

Table of contents

Table of contents

Administrator's Guide for iBaan E-Service Remote 2.1 ii

Administrator's Guide for iBaan E-Service Remote 2.1iii

This document is an Administrator’s Guide that describes the administration of iBaan E-Service Remote, which forms part of the iBaan E-Enterprise Suite. This guide is intended for administrators who are responsible for the implementation of iBaan E-Service Remote.

The information in this guide is divided in to the following chapters:

Chapter 1, “iBaan E-Enterprise Suite architecture,” provides an overview of iBaan E-Enterprise Suite and its architecture.

Chapter 2, “To navigate iBaan E-Enterprise Suite,” describes how to navigate through the iBaan E-Enterprise Suite.

Chapter 3, “To administer E-Service Remote,” details the administration of the iBaan E-Service Remote application.

For details on how to setup user logins, refer to the Administrator's Guide for iBaan E-Enterprise Server 2.5 (U7702AUS).

About this document

About this document

Administrator's Guide for iBaan E-Service Remote 2.1 iv

Administrator's Guide for iBaan E-Service Remote 2.11-1

Description The Baan E-Enterprise Suite uses Internet technologies to offer enterprise functionality to customers and suppliers, as well as to users in an organization. Based on a common platform, the Baan E-Enterprise Suite delivers seamless integration with Baan’s entire range of products, and a single point of design and maintenance. E-Service Remote is a Web-based application on the E-Enterprise platform, which is intended for field service operations. E-Service Remote aims at effectively disseminating information to the field service engineers.

This chapter deals with the basics of the E-Enterprise architecture and principles, which are necessary to understand the underlying functionality of E-Service Remote.

Design principles The iBaan E-Enterprise Suite was developed according to the following design principles:

A multitier distributed application model, developed using Microsoft technologies with an independent presentation logic, business logic, and data storage logic.

Scalable applications to process thousands of concurrent users and to be accessible through slow network connections.

Independent browser to operate with software already in use.

Decoupled with back-end systems so that applications are release-independent. The philosophy is, ‘Develop once, use on any related application’. The related application must have an open system.

Authorization and security are well designed to maintain budget and cost information and service order activities downloaded by the field service engineers.

Easily deployed, because client-side installations are minimized and the system only requires minimal run-time attention. E-Service Remote has relatively thicker client because of certain validations and offline workability.

1 iBaan E-Enterprise Suite architecture

iBaan E-Enterprise Suite architecture

Administrator's Guide for iBaan E-Service Remote 2.1 1-2

iBaan E-Enterprise architecture The architecture for iBaan E-Enterprise products is based on the Microsoft Windows Distributed Internet Applications Architecture (Windows DNA) to deliver robust, scalable, and distributed Internet applications. Key elements of this platform include the following:

Internet Information Server. Windows 2000, Active Server Pages. Active Data Objects. Component Object Model (COM). COM+. Microsoft Message Queue Server and Microsoft SQL Server. Microsoft Visual Studio Connectivity Packs

Benefits of the architecture The iBaan E-Enterprise architecture delivers the following common platform benefits:

Reduced training with easy-to-use and minimal number of web pages.

Simplified access with a single security process.

Reduced complexity with shared application services, such as Personalization.

Reduced support costs with shared administration services and standardized development tools.

Easy integration of third-party products to expand solution capability.

Customers of Baan E-Enterprise benefit from the Microsoft-centric architecture in another important way: Baan is focused on developing specialized business applications based on existing intellectual property, instead of recreating lower-level services that are generally available in most development platforms. In this way, Baan has a better chance to exceed customer expectations of product functionality and quality.

The use of Microsoft Web tools iBaan E-Enterprise products are developed with the help of Microsoft tools. Visual InterDev is used to build Web applications and to provide integration with the Microsoft Web server, Internet Information Server (IIS), to deploy and test the applications. The languages used are Visual Basic Script and Visual Basic.



Visual SourceSafe is used to store application sources including older versions. Visual SourceSafe integrates with both Visual InterDev and the Web server. This integration with the Web server is carried out with the FrontPage extensions. For more information on the tools, refer to the Microsoft documentation.

Tools such as Visual InterDev and iPlanet LDAP server enable you to easily modify the application. For example, you can use Design Time Control (DTC) to create functionality so that the resulting application contains generated scripts that can easily be modified.

iBaan E-Enterprise technology A company’s choice of technology for e-commerce applications is influenced greatly by the technology available. But scalability, system load, and performance also play a major role in the decision. iBaan E-Enterprise is designed to take advantage of two principles: a thin client and a multitier setup.

Thin client

The idea behind iBaan E-Enterprise is greater profitability by offering customer remote service capabilities. This type of service must be as accessible as possible and must require the smallest possible investment in an IT infrastructure by business partners.

For this reason, iBaan E-Enterprise uses a thin client. Most of the computer capability is required at the server side (your system) but not at the field service engineer' side (the client). However, the field service engineer might need to set up master data on the client to have practical performance levels, because, in most cases, master data is too large and takes too much time to download every time.

Multi-tier setup

A commonly used setup for Internet applications is a two-tier architecture. The setup consists of a client side with a Web browser and a server side with the application logic and databases.

iBaan E-Enterprise uses a multi-tier setup. The minimum number of tiers is three.

The tiers are:

The client side with the Web browser.

The server side with business logic, including Internet Information Server (IIS), Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS), and the middle-ware application, such as Baan Sync or Master Data Sync.



The server side with the databases.

Using an extra server for the ERP backbone, or by putting IIS or MTS on separate servers, you can create a multitier setup with more than three tiers.

The advantages of a multitier setup include the following:

Improved security for the back-end database.

Improved scalability, because performance can be controlled better.

Reduced risk of total failure through being spread across separate machines.

Web server architecture The Web Server architecture consists of the following software components:

Microsoft Internet Information Server 5.0. COM+ Baan E-Enterprise 2.0 Active Server Pages. Baan E-Enterprise 2.0 COM components.

The following figure illustrates how the various components interact:

Figure 1-1 Web server architecture



When a user requests a particular Web page, the Web server goes through an Active Server Page (ASP). Because the data format to make E-Service Remote work effectively happens to be XML, this application can run only on Internet Explorer version 5.0 and later.

Back-office integration architecture The iBaan E-Enterprise architecture facilitates communication with several types of back-end systems. iBaan E-Enterprise not only can integrate with Baan systems, currently iBaan ERP for E-Service Remote, but can also provide an abstraction layer called the back-end component to enable easy integration with other back-end systems.

The following figure illustrates this architecture:

Figure 1-2 Back-end integration architecture Application developers always use the back-end component to communicate with a back-end system to hide the complexities of the various communication mechanisms.

Administrators can use the Baan E-Enterprise Back-end DTC to create new self-service applications that disclose information in the back-end system on the Internet.


This chapter details the navigation through the various components of the E-Enterprise suite of products.

When the Web site on which the E-Service Remote product has been installed is accessed, the user is presented with a page that enables access to the Web site, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 2-1 iBaan E-Service Remote Login page The default login and password that is provided by the application for the Web site administrator to access the administrator pages are Administrator and baan, respectively.

2 To navigate iBaan E-Enterprise Suite

To navigate iBaan E-Enterprise Suite


After the administrator logs on to the Web site with the login and password, a default page appears, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 2-2 iBaan E-Enterprise Server default page Web site administrators can click E-Manager hyperlink to configure the Web site for service engineers to access the site.



When the administrator clicks the E-Manager hyperlink, the following default page appears:

Figure 2-3 E-Manager default page The following sections detail the various modules of E-Enterprise product suite that the Web site administrator must use to set up E-Service Remote:

E-Common To set up logins for field service engineers, refer to Administrator's Guide for iBaan E-Enterprise Server 2.5 (U7702AUS) for details on E-Common setup.

E-Service Remote E-Service Remote is an intranet-based remote field service application that extends the Baan Service Package in iBaan ERP. E-Service Remote provides pertinent information to the field service engineers, which helps these engineers to perform their day-to-day service activities. In addition, the application also provides a platform on which the progress on the activities can be reported from this application to the back office, which in this case is iBaan ERP.



An administrator can do the following:

Set up parameters that govern the functioning of E-ServiceRemote as desired by the service organization.

Provide details about service engineers, based on which data will be made available to service engineers.

Track the various tasks that have been executed by the service engineers, which include creation and modification of service orders, service activities and service cost lines.


This chapter describes how to administer E-Service Remote.

E-Service Remote contains the following two administrator components:

Basic Data − Parameters. − User Defaults. − Re-Generate Client Internationalization.

Transaction Data. − Not Processed. − Successful. − Unsuccessful. − All.

The Web administrator must log on to the E-Service Remote Web site using administrator login and password and navigate through the default page of E-Manager.

On the Login screen, click E-Manager and, on the Navigation pane to the left, click E-Service Remote. The following page appears:

Figure 3-1 E-Service Remote Maintenance page The page consists of manager functions of E-Service Remote.

3 To administer E-Service Remote

To administer E-Service Remote


Basic data

To set up parameters On the Navigation pane to the left, under E-Service Remote, click Parameter Settings. The Select Parameter to Update page appears. The parameters can be set up for E-Service Remote.

Figure 3-2 Select Parameter to Update page The administrator must set up only five parameters. The parameters are explained in detail in the following sections. iBaan ERP uses the other fields for internal processing.

Accept Assignments The Accept Assignments parameter value can have either of the following two values:

Automatic: The assignments are automatically moved to the field service engineer’s workspace. The workspace option is dependent on the theme used. A theme is a user interface that enables the user with a workable environment. Based on the theme, the workspace might or might not be present.

Manual: The field service engineers must manually accept the assignments.



Default Language You can set the Default Language parameter value. The administrator can set the default language. The Visual Basic stand-alone applications, BESRemoteCreateMasterData.exe, ESRemoteSynchronizeMasterData.exe, and BESRemoteBroker.exe, display processing messages in the language specified in this parameter.

MDSyncAuto The MDSyncAuto parameter value can be set to the following values:

Yes: The master data synchronization is automatic.

No: The master data synchronization is not automatic.

MD Sync Bus Component ESRSynchronizeMasterData application uses values of this parameter to determine the appropriate iBaan OpenWorld Bus Component. Using the Bus Component, it connects to iBaan ERP application server and extracts the changes in Master Data.

When you install E-ServiceRemote and view ESR parameters for the first time, the value of parameter is as illustrated in the following figure:

Replace ldap_root by root name of the LDAP Directory Service. For example, cn=ESRMdSync, o=baan.com

Once you have provided the correct value of this parameter, use iBaan OpenWorld BusComponent Editor to define Bus Component(s).

The name of Bus Component must have the following syntax:

cn=ESRMdSync-BaanERPCompanyID, o=ldap_root ”BaanERPCompanyID” must be replaced by the Baan ERP Company number from which Master Data changes need to be extracted The value of BaanERPCompanyID must be equal to the value assigned to “Company Number” attribute of Bus Component ldap_root must be replaced by the value provided to “MDSyncBusComponent” parameter For example, Bus Component name can be: cn=ESRMdSync-610, o=baan.com



“ESRMdSync” is case-sensitive.

Process to Baan The Process To Baan parameter value can be set to either of the following:

Automatic: The assignments that are uploaded by field service engineers (FSE) to the Web server are automatically uploaded into iBaan ERP. The application BESRemoteBroker.exe can be placed in Windows 2000 Scheduled Tasks.

Manual: The administrator uploads the assignments that are uploaded by field service engineers (FSE) to the Web server into iBaan ERP manually by running the application BESRemoteBroker.exe.

To set up user defaults E-Service Remote requires specific details of a service engineer, which enable the FSE to exchange data with BaanERP system.

To setup user defaults, the data must be imported from ERP.

The details required are:

Login assigned to the FSE to log on to the E-Service Remote Web site.

Employee ID assigned to the FSE in iBaan ERP.

Service center to which the FSE belongs.

iBaan ERP company number to which the FSE is related.

Business instance must be maintained for each user login to upload the transactional data uploaded by the field service engineers to the Web server.

Installed Theme: Depending on the themes, the options on the navigation pane differ for the field service engineers.

All these details can be maintained in iBaan ERP Service software and imported into the E-Service Remote database. As a result, E-Service Remote provides exchange scheme and DTS package, using which the data can be imported from back office into E-Service Remote database.

Service organizations are not required to maintain data in user defaults in iBaan Service.

NOTE

NOTE

NOTE



In case a service organization does not maintain user defaults in iBaan Service, the Web administrator must maintain the required data. To maintain the required data, on the Navigation pane to the left, under E-Service Remote, click UserDefaults.

Figure 3-4 View User Defaults page



To edit or delete an existing user default, click the existing login link. The Update User Defaults page appears, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 3-5 Update User Defaults page

The user can either edit or delete the details of the user default. Only the enabled fields can be edited. After the fields are edited, click Update to incorporate the changes.

To delete the user default record, click Delete User Defaults at the bottom of the page.



To add a user default, click on the Add User Default, at the bottom of the page. The Add User Defaults page appears, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 3-6 Ass User Defaults page Field descriptions

Login: In this field, enter the login ID of the employee. The login ID must be the same as the ID specified in E-Common.

Employee: Select the employee ID assigned in iBaan ERP from this list. Service Center: Select the service center to which the employee belongs in

iBaan ERP from this list. Sales Representative:

The sales representative who will interact with the customer. This field is optional.

Company: The ERP company to which the service employee belongs.

Business Instance: The BUS component used to connect to the back end.

Master Data last updated on: The date on which the master data was last updated on the field service engineer’s client machine.

Click Add, to include the user default.



(Re)Generate Client I18N On the navigation pane to the left, under E-Service Remote, click (Re)Generate Client I18N. The (Re)Generate Client I18N page appears, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 3-7 (Re)Generate Client I18N page This page is used to handle internationalization for the field service engineer end user pages. The XML and XSL files that the field service engineer accesses are language-dependent. When the language selected from the list in the previous screen, these XML and XSL files are made language-specific. For example, ESRNavigation.xml is a template file, which will used to generate language specific file. If the language specified is US-English, the program would read I18NTEXT labels from EServiceRemote database and generate the language specific file by the name ESRNavigation1033.xml.



To change the language, take the following steps:

1 Select the language from the Select Language list.

2 Click Re-Generate. The following screen appears:

Figure 3-8 E-Service Remote Maintenance page



Transaction Data

To maintain transactions The client uploads data to be processed in ERP. The data is stored in the CLIENTSERVERINTERACTION table in the E-Service Remote database in the database server. When the administrator runs the BESRemoteBroker.exe application, which is present in <directory where Application is installed>/ Applications\E-ServiceRemote\SynchronizeTransactionalData, the data from the CLIENTSERVERINTERACTION table is taken and updates the transactional data into iBaan ERP. Periodically, the administrator can delete the records. The application consists of the following transactions:

Successful Unsuccessful Not processed All

More information about these transactions is provided in the following sections.

Successful transactions On the navigation pane to the left, under Transaction, click Successful. The View Transactions – Successful page appears, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 3-9 View Transactions – Successful page



This page lists the details of job sheets, assignments, or general hours that have been successfully completed.

Field descriptions Employee: This field contains the name of the employee.

Sent Items: This field specifies the job sheet, assignment, and general hours details.

Action Taken: This field specifies the action that has been carried out on the job sheet or assignment.

Sent on: The date and time on which the field service engineer sends the job sheet or assignment.

Processed on: The date and time on which the job sheet or assignment is processed.

Unsuccessful transactions On the navigation pane to the left, under Transactions, click UnSuccessful, to open the View Transactions – Unsuccessful page:

Figure 3-10 View Transactions – Unsuccessful page



The page lists the details of job sheets or assignments that have not been successfully completed. To view the reasons for unsuccessful transactions, click the Sent Items link to open the Details page, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 3-11 Details page The Details page describes the error that occurred, and due to which the transaction was unsuccessful.

For field descriptions, refer to “Successful transaction,” previously in this chapter.

All transactions On the navigation pane to the left, under Transaction, click All to open the View Transactions – All page, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 3-12 View Transactions – All page



The Transactions page lists the details of all job sheets or assignments that have either been completed or are in progress.

For field descriptions, refer to the “Successful transactions,” previously mentioned in this chapter.

Not processed On the navigation pane to the left, under Transaction, click Not Processed to open the View Transactions – Not Processed page, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 3-13 View Transactions – Not Processed page The page lists the transactions that are not processed.

For field descriptions, refer to “Successful transactions,” previously in this chapter.

With these details, the administration of the iBaan E-Service Remote application is complete. The administrator determines the options available to the user.

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