Thursday, April 7, 2011

Lawson Mashup Designer – Getting M3 Customers Excited

What got customers excited earlier this week at CUE 2011 (Lawson’s annual Customer User Event)? The announcement that seemed to cause the biggest stir amongst the M3 customers was Lawson Mashup Designer. It is a new tool that helps Lawson customers build their own composite applications from multiple data sources, on-screen views and business intelligence reports – all without having to write software code. Only having one (quite full and busy) day at CUE this year, I didn’t have a chance to see all I wanted to see. So for now this will be some initial observations, with more to follow.
Lawson Mashup Designer is based on Lawson Smart Office (LSO), which was released back in March 2008. The original goal of LSO was along the same lines of thought as Mashup Designer is today. It was meant to be an intuitive, personalized user interface that allows users to directly access Lawson and Microsoft applications and update data pervasively and instantly across the applications. But while the emphasis of LSO initially was on those Microsoft productivity tools such as Microsoft Excel, Outlook, Word and PowerPoint, Mashup Designer builds upon LSO and extends beyond the realm of Microsoft and has customers fired up about the possibilities. In fact in talking with the COO and CFO of JR Watkins, a Lawson M3 customer, the pair commented that Mashups were “what lit our fire. We can definitely visualize how they could be used in our environment.”
Matthew Allbee, product management director for Lawson describes Lawson Mashup Designer as, “a new way for our customers to build better applications that they can use every day. By combining forms, process flows, data views, reports and business intelligence content into a single user-created application, we're now offering a new level of user customization. But most important, this does not require advanced programming skills. Instead, people who use Lawson every day can quickly start to create their own task- or process-specific applications."
But the keyword here might be “advanced” programming skills. While the intent is to be a tool for line of business versus IT, it is primarily for Lawson power users, system administrators and programmers, not your casual user or users that spend their entire time performing one specific function using M3.
LSO, being the foundation for Mashup Designer, is a prerequisite. Although the Mashup Designer is only available with M3, Lawson also plans to make it available for S3. In the meantime, for a limited time (until the end of August) LSO is available at no charge to any S3 customer with Lawson System Foundation (LSF). Those that take the deal do have to pay maintenance on LSO. For those S3 customers that have already purchased LSO – contact your customer service rep. Sounds like you could get some added incentives.
Details aside, what struck me first and foremost about Lawson Mashup Designer was the similarity in concept to Infor’s recently announced Infor Workspace. This is particularly relevant if in fact the proposed acquisition of Lawson by Infor goes through. You’ve got two companies thinking very much along the same lines in terms of a role based user experience that blurs the boundaries between disparate enterprise applications and web-based tools and applications. It would be great to see this kind of synergy accelerate the feature/function and technology innovation that the combined company could deliver to its customers.

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