Revert LBI to a Previous Version

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If you did an upgrade-in-place of LBI and are experiencing issues with it, you can revert to the previous version.

Before you begin a task like this, always get snapshots of your sever!!!

****If you don’t have a backup of your pre-upgrade database, then you won’t be able to complete these steps.  You can’t revert the database changes.  Always start with a database backup!!!****

 

Revert CRAS

You don’t need to perform this step unless your previous version of LBI requires a different version of CRAS.  To revert Crystal Report Application Server, you need to uninstall the new version, and reinstall the old version.  CRAS does not uninstall cleanly, so once you step through the wizard, and reboot the server, you will need to clear out the components left behind in the registry.  Here are the registry keys you may need to delete (key names may differ based on your version):

  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SAP Business Objects\Suite XI 4.0\Crystal Reports\
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ SAP Business Objects\Suite XI 4.0\Crystal Reports
  • HKEY_USERS\S-#-#-##-…-####\Software\ SAP Business Objects\Suite XI 4.0\Crystal Reports

Reboot again.  Try reinstalling the older version.  If you get any errors during the reinstall, you may have left behind some keys in the registry.  You can search the registry for “Crystal”.

 

Uninstall LBI From WebSphere

In WebSphere Administration Console, navigate to Applications > Application Types > WebSphere enterprise applications.  Select all of your LBI applications (Framework Services, Reporting Services, Smart Notification), and Uninstall.

Reboot the server.

 

Rename the LBI Install Directory

Stop the IBM WebSphere Application server service, then rename your LBI install directory.  This way, you can install your previous version of LBI in the same directory.

 

Restore Data

Restore your pre-upgrade data to the RS, FS, and SN databases.

 

Reinstall LBI

Run the LBI install wizard for your previous version.  Verify that the applications were deployed to WebSphere and that they were started.  Perform smoke tests.

 

You should be ready to retry the upgrade!  LBI upgrades can be finicky with WebSphere and database updates.  I recommend rebooting between each component update.  So, reboot before you begin.  Then reboot after upgrading Framework Services.  Then reboot after upgrading Reporting Services.  And so on…

Top Five Digital Health Technology Trends

The current pandemic has shifted the importance of healthcare technology and the healthcare industry. Remote-care, telehealth, digital services, wearables, and other technologies have been a key resource for people who have limited their trips to the doctor’s office. Brad Womble shares an article on MDDIonline of five digital health technology trends thanks to the pandemic (according to the 2020 Digital Health Technology Trends survey):

  1. The Primary Healthcare Innovation Driver is Consumer Demand
  2. Wearables and On-Body Devices are the Trendiest Solutions
  3. Digital Health Solutions See Shorter Development Timelines
  4. Interoperability is Critical for Digital Health Success
  5. External Partners Help Make Digital Health a Reality

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the usefulness and validity of new technology-enabled care protocols, like telehealth and remote patient monitoring, says Womble. It’s increased use and dependency during this time will likely shape the way we utilize our resources in healthcare for years to come.

 

For Full Article, Click Here

3 Ways Technology is Transforming Wellbeing

Cecilia Amador de San José shares an article on allwork.space of the many ways technology has transformed our wellbeing. Technology has been making great leaps over the past several decades and while it has ‘disrupted industries and job, it has also created opportunities and made our lives a bit easier. Here are 3 ways technology can improve our wellness.

  1. Improve Communication and Access to Resources – “Communication is a key element of a healthy, happy, and productive organization. Technology powered platforms can help improve communication by increasing engagement and they can help identify any flags that could potentially lead to a rise in stress levels, isolation, or burnout.”
  2. Rise of Telemedicine – “Telemedicine has been used to follow-up with patients, do routine checkups of chronic conditions, and provide specialty services and treatments (interpretation of laboratories, imaging results, etc.).  It is making it easier for workers to seek help while balancing it with their workload. It also helps improve employee decision making when it comes to seeking care for small things as well as larger issues.”
  3. Promotes Healthier Lifestyles – “Technologies like wearable devices can help promote healthier lifestyles. Devices such as the FitBit or smart watches that remind people to stand up and walk, drink water, and monitor sleep patterns have the potential to drive healthier lifestyles and help individuals make better, healthier choices for themselves.”

 

For Full Article, Click Here

How to Build Resilience Amid Supply Chain Disruption

According to Accenture, 94% of Fortune 1000 companies are experiencing supply chain disruptions due to COVID 19. Infor’s Josh Ferguson shares an article on sdcexec.com on how to bolster resilience in supply chain during this pandemic. There are four essential steps that enterprises should consider so they can respond and react with flexibility to continued supply chain disruption.

Step 1: Connectivity and digitization
“Organizations that connect their supply chain partners into a multi-enterprise business network can have access to real-time information, rapid access to capital, and enhanced shipment visibility.”

Step 2: End-to-end visibility
“End-to-end visibility, which offers insight into every aspect impacting inventory in the supply chain, is critical to resiliency.”

Step 3: Collaboration across partners
“The need for connectivity across all supply chain partners is so they can share data across the network and leverage embedded collaboration tools to improve decision making.”

Step 4: Institutional learning from previous setbacks
“The most resilient enterprises view every challenge as an opportunity to learn. They investigate every mistake, from quality mishaps to missed deliveries, to identify and eliminate core causes.”

 

For Full Article, Click Here

Database Errors after an LBI Upgrade

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When using the wizard to perform an in-place update to LBI, occasionally the database scripts will fail without notification. The issue will typically present itself when you restart the IBM services and the SystemOut.log throws database errors, such as “invalid object name” or “field does not exist” after the application attempts to run a query.

The good news is that the database update scripts can be run manually.  These scripts can be found at <lbi_install_dir>\<product>\<product>.ear\<product>war-<version>.war\WEB-INF\rdbms\<database type>

So, for example:

  • D:\LBI\ReportingServices\Reporting Services.ear\erswar-10.6.0.0.war\WEB-INF\rdbms\MSSQL2K
  • D:\LBI\FrameworkServices\Framework Services.ear\efswar-10.6.0.0.war\WEB-INF\rdbms\MSSQL2K
  • D:\LBI\SmartNotifications\Smart Notifications.ear\lsnwar-10.6.0.0.war\WEB-INF\rdbms\MSSQL2K

You want to run all the update scripts that exist between your old version and your new version.  So, if you are upgrading from 10.4 to 10.6, you would run the highlighted scripts:

***IMPORTANT:  DO NOT run the oracle.sql or TreeSchma.sql script. They will drop all your tables.

 

 

 

Why Facial Recognition Remains a Powerful Yet Controversial Technology

Facial recognition technology has been constantly worked on for around 50 years, but it only recently has been a popular feature in smart technology and security. According to Gritdaily.com, experts believe that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, facial recognition technology has gained more popularity because the technology is being used by governments as part of their attempts to track and trace people who are affected by the virus. Being a hands free and easy way to unlock devices or confirm identification, face recognition has been a popular option. However, this biometric identification technology may pose some difficulty on people who are wearing masks to protect themselves in public. The articles shares with the UK’s government now advising people to wear masks when out in public, facial recognition may need to be upgraded in order to still be useful. Additionally, biometric identification technology would play a part should governments turn to using new COVID-19 immunity passports.

 

For Full Article, Click Here

De Menken Keuken Selects Infor M3 ERP Solution to Support Growth and Boost Future Goals

De Menken Keuken has selected Infor M3 ERP (enterprise resource planning) solution to support growth, increase efficiency and help provide business continuity. De Menken Keuken produces a wide range of salads, sauces and meat products for retail, catering and hospitality customers. This is done mainly under private label. Its portfolio includes the Albert Heijn supermarket brand Saladespecialiteiten, carpaccio from de Vleeschmeesters, and a selection of tapenades and hummus spreads. Per the press release, By standardizing with Infor M3, De Menken Keuken can migrate from its existing IBM AS/400 solution to a modern, innovative, and industry-specific system that can help them navigate challenges while helping control costs, reduce manual work and boost efficiency.

 

For Full Article, Click Here

10 Benefits of Hiring a Managed Service Partner

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There is no doubt that the right managed service partner (MSP) can elevate your business and bring all sorts of new possibility within reach. Here are some ways that the right MSP relationship can benefit your organization.

  1. Economy of scale – Your managed service provider is likely servicing dozens of customers whose business is similar to yours. Therefore, instead of one subject matter expert (SME) to work with each client, a SME can handle the requests of three or four customers and reduce the overall costs.
  2. 24/7/365 coverage – Having constant, around-the-clock coverage of your entire application infrastructure is not realistic for every business. However, managed service companies specialize in this specific mode of operation and depending on the engagement will provide this coverage at no additional cost.
  3. Cross-client experience sharing – Your managed service provider likely has several customers who work with the same set of applications as your organization and therefore go through the same changes at roughly the same times. Very often when you report an issue to your managed service provider, they have been working with other clients on the same problem and can resolve it very quickly. This cross-client experience sharing is what gives MSPs the leverage to offer you lower costs than you would get on your own.
  4. Training – To maintain all your existing applications and to keep up with ongoing changes, you have to keep your staff trained and certified in multiple skill sets. It’s an unending task that is never near completion. Most IT managers will admit that their staff is far behind on their training plan. Your MSP however is trained and certified in all the right areas and maintains their certifications with all the software partners. You no longer have to worry about keeping up on a skill set that doesn’t have to do with your core business.
  5. Business focus – Your primary business is more than likely not managing applications. In an ideal world all your company staff would be focused on the core of your business and not on operating payroll, financial, and inventory control applications. That is exactly the kind of focus you will gain by partnering with the right MSP.
  6. Proactive maintenance – Most IT departments are focused on keeping the lights on and break-fix issues. Proactive maintenance has become a luxury most companies can’t afford and rarely even think about. Your managed service partner profits only when the number of hours it takes to maintain your account is less than the monthly fee you have committed to. With interests aligned in this way, your MSP will take a more active role in making sure things are maintained well and they break far less often.
  7. Skills coverage – Many of the skills required throughout the year to maintain all your applications are one-off skills that never really become relevant again. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to train your staff in installation, upgrade, and setup of your applications when those tasks are only happening once every few years and changing each time. Your MSP partner, however, uses those skills with several clients and will always have trained staff on hand for such tasks.
  8. Single point of ownership – Having single point of ownership for trouble tickets, maintenance, change control, SLAs, and application related upkeep ensures that work gets done without the need to coordinate between several parties and the buck doesn’t get passed around.
  9. Reduced downtime – Proactive maintenance, the presence of a skilled and ever-ready work force, and around-the-clock coverage means the potential for downtime would be reduced to nearly zero.
  10. Leaner staff – With all the distracting applications managed by your MSP, you are now free to focus on the core applications that run your business and give you competitive advantage in the marketplace. Your team can be leaner and more focused without the need for staff with narrow skills for single-use applications. Most organizations are able to reduce their teams by 30% when partnering with a MSP.

 

Learn more about our managed services page here

Infor and Elvenite Expand Cooperation in Nordic Food Industry

Infor recently announced its collaboration with alliance partner Elvenite to deliver a combination of modern technology and successful, reliable implementations for food producers and the grocery trade in the Nordics based around Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage. Having worked together since 2009, this strong partnership aids in Elvenite’s growth plan, with the goal to double turnover in three years. Per the press release, “The collaboration with Infor gives us access to the latest technology. This means we can combine Infor’s industry-specific CloudSuite with our knowledge of the food industry’s challenges, business and business processes, a combination that is extremely valuable for our customers,” says Mathias Dyberg, CEO of Elvenite. Jörn Berg, group IT applications manager at Mowi, said: “Elvenite has unique knowledge and experience of successful implementations of Infor’s products in the food industry. With their help, we have developed a global platform that we can now roll out to all our units around the world. The delivery exceeds our high expectations, both in terms of quality and results.”

 

For Full Article, Click Here

Top 10 BI Tools in 2020 to Enhance Business Productivity

Business Intelligence (BI) tools allows enterprises to lessen the time-consuming tasks of combining data manually. Finding the most data harnessing and business intelligence tool is necessary. Analytics Insight has compiled a list of 10 top BI tools best suited for your business.

Microsoft Power BI helps people create and share interactive data visualizations across global data centers, including national clouds to meet your compliance and regulation needs. You can meet both your self-service and enterprise data analytics needs on a single platform while accessing powerful semantic models, an application lifecycle management (ALM) toolkit, an open connectivity framework, and fixed-layout, pixel-perfect paginated reports.

Infor Birst® is a native cloud business intelligence (BI) and business analytics platform that helps organizations understand and optimize complex processes in less time than traditional BI solutions. Built with patented automation and machine learning technologies, Birst’s “networked BI” approach connects teams and applications across the enterprise via a trusted network of analytics and insights to inform smarter decisions.

SAS Business Intelligence software provides the most comprehensive, integrated, and easy-to-use reporting and analytics features. You can explore all your data, discover new patterns, and create rich visuals and share insights. You can quickly gain insights using automated analysis backed by machine learning, with easy-to-understand natural language explanations. Visually explore all relevant data, and quickly spot hidden relationships.

IBM Cognos Analytics is an AI-fueled business intelligence platform that supports the entire analytics cycle, from discovery to operationalization. You can visualize, analyze, and share actionable insights about your data with anyone in your organization. You can also deploy where and when you need it with support for multi-cloud environments – public, private, on-premise, and on IBM Cloud Pak™ for Data.

Qlik Sense is a complete data analytics platform that sets the benchmark for a new generation of analytics. With its one-of-a-kind associative analytics engine, sophisticated AI, and high-performance cloud platform, you can empower everyone in your organization to make better decisions daily, creating a truly data-driven enterprise. Qlik Sense is for all – executives, decision-makers, analysts, and others. It enables any BI use case and let users freely search and explore to uncover insights they won’t find with query-based BI tools.

Sisense data and analytics platform is a complete end-to-end BI platform that empowers data engineers, developers, and analysts to build analytic apps that deliver highly interactive user experiences. The Sisense data and analytics platform dramatically accelerates the time it takes to build, embed, and deploy intelligent analytic apps that unleash user creativity and engagement.

Looker’s uniquely powerful data platform helps companies get real value from their data. With Looker’s BI solution, everyone in the business can ask sophisticated questions of the data and get insights that make sense. Looker’s powerful explore section gives users of all levels a drag-and-drop experience so they can go beyond pre-made dashboards and reports to ask their unique questions. This flexible interface allows users to iterate on questions in real-time and better understand their piece of the business.

Tableau can harness the power of your data and unleash the potential of your people. It can help organizations address every step in the cycle of analytics—data preparation in Tableau Prep, analysis and discovery in Tableau Desktop, and sharing and governance in Tableau Server or Tableau Online.

MicroStrategy provides the technology to make it happen. MicroStrategy’s powerful analytical engine, comprehensive toolsets, variety of data connectors, and scalable, open architecture ensure you have everything you need to extend access to analytics across every team and business function.

Zoho Analytics is a self-service BI and data analytics software that lets you create visually appealing data visualizations and insightful dashboards in minutes. It can transform huge amounts of raw data into actionable reports and dashboards while tracking your key business metrics, see longtime trends, identify outliers, and unearth hidden insights.

 

For Full Article, Click Here