Using collaboration in Infor Smart Office

The entire way of collaborating in Smart Office has been rebuilt. The changes include updates to the UI, several new features, and more straightforward ways of communicating and sharing information with your colleagues.

New user interface

The Communicator widget has been given a new design supporting personal contacts and favorites, filtering offline contacts, and adding new contacts via search. Smart Office Contacts now supports awareness.

  • Online - green
  • Busy - red
  • Away - yellow
  • Do not disturb - red with white line
  • Offline - light grey

These states can be set via the personal contact in the toolbar, although Away is automatically set when the user has been inactive for a set amount of time.

Conversation window

The Conversation window has been given a completely new tab design where each ongoing conversation has its own separate tab.

Collaboration in Smart Office now supports group chat. Users can add additional contacts via the add contact icon in the top right corner of the conversation.

One-to-one conversation supports sending offline messages and searchable history logging via the document button to the right of the add contact button. File transfers in conversation is only supported to one-to-one chat. By clicking the attachment button next to Send, a context menu opens and users can choose between sending a file or sending a screenshot. All type of files can be sent but there is a file size restriction.

Screen sharing

Clicking the screen sharing button next to the attach button will show a context menu where the user can choose between sharing his/her entire screen or a specific running application in Smart Office.

When the user chooses the target for the screen sharing session, a screen sharing controller opens, letting the user control the session. The session can be paused and resumed, stopped, as well as switching the target of the session. The screen sharing controller also contains an area where participants of the conversation can be kicked out from the screen sharing and re-invited as well. Two collapsible views are also included in the controller where the latest messages and a minified view of what is being shared are presented. It is also possible to collapse the entire controller into a view that only keeps the control buttons and the current status of the session, which can be:

  • Waiting - no users have accepted the enquiry yet
  • Sharing - at least one user has accepted the enquiry
  • Paused - session is paused
  • Stopped - session is stopped

New ways of collaborating

The Collaboration feature has been integrated to Smart Office in an intuitive and straightforward way. One way to communicate to a person responsible for a report is to open the Item panel of a form, then next to "Item resp:", left click the user's icon to open a conversation dialog or right click on it to open a context menu with additional options.

Sharing Smart Office content

By using the Collaboration framework, it is now possible to share Smart Office content such as Bookmarks, Links, Images, Widgets etc. For example, a user wants to share an image of a form, which can be done in two ways: either by right clicking the related task in the taskbar or via Tools in the application itself.

  • Right click on the related task in the taskbar, select Share, then click Image

  • From the form, click Tools, select Share, then click Image

If you choose Collaboration as the target of the image, the Choose recipient dialog opens, from this, you can choose a contact to whom you can share the image with. Upon choosing a contact, click the OK button and a new or existing conversation tab opens. A transfer message is added to the conversation.

Smart Office notifications

A new dialog box, which displays different text messages, appears for a short amount of time in the top-right corner of the screen. If you choose to interact with the notification, you can click somewhere on the dialog box and the related conversation is shown. Notification alerts can be set in the related application settings.

Paint

You can use paint if you want to share and edit a screenshot of the form you are working on. This application can be accessed by entering paint:// in the Start field of the canvas. Select Screenshot and the screen fades to light grey. When the cursor changes to a crosshair, hold the crosshair and drag it to the area of the screen that you want to capture. After the area has been selected, the captured image is displayed in paint. You can also add text, highlight, or draw in the captured image.