LawsonGuru Blog

Lawson morphs into Infor, continued.  You might have missed this notification, and I haven’t heard much noise regarding it. But I will share my insight.

As a practical matter, this simply means that you will soon be using some different tools when you visit the MyLawson.com support site. But I also see a couple of significant milestones:

• The end of our love/hate relationship with the Lawson KB. As I’ve pointed out previously, I was surprised Lawson had continued—post-acquisition by Infor—to expend resources on the KB. It has become a sprawling mess of articles, documentation, and Lawson Community posts. When patches were added, that further exacerbated our inability to find anything. Infor’s replacement solution, frankly, can’t be much worse.
• CASE is gone, is Landmark far behind? Adopted with great fanfare, CASE did offer some useful features compared to its predecessor, Lawson Interactive Support (LIS). But it always felt like it wasn’t quite ready for prime time. Most importantly, I think this signals another nail in the coffin for Landmark.  As I’ve said before, Infor has been touting its Mongoose development framework. I don’t expect Infor to carry forward multiple legacy/siloed products. Sure, Landmark is the foundation for Lawson Process Automation (LPA), but LPA was planned and developed prior to the Infor acquisition. I think LPA is merely a stepping stone to Infor ION, and other Landmark-based products (Strategic Sourcing, Talent Management, etc.) will eventually get re-written in Mongoose.

Update, 08/30/2012: Corrections to my speculation regarding Landmark, from Darci Snyder, Lawson/Infor Director Product Management:

"Landmark has been re-branded to Infor Java Framework and is one of the development foundations that we use as an organization. We have several products where we are looking for betas that are built on the Infor Java Framework – Close Management, Reconciliation Management, AP Automation, Operational Cash Management – there are Statement of Directions on MyLawson.com that talk about these products. These products are strategic to the Office of the CFO initiative that we have been working on. We released Recall Management – also written in Landmark this last spring for the Healthcare customer base. So Landmark (Infor Java Framework) is being leveraged on many current projects and other farther out on the roadmap that can’t be discussed yet. The support tools are changing – but this isn’t a reflection on Landmark – just a tools consolidation within the company."