4 ways of Gaining Self-sufficiency in the Infor Multi-tenant Cloud

 

Whether you have moved to Infor’s multi-tenant cloud or are thinking about it for the future, this is a practical guide with tips for increasing your self-sufficiency by leveraging content from Infor.

The Infor multi-tenant cloud enables customers to be self-sufficient which will help you minimize your operational costs. You will get the most gains if your administrator is fully aware of how to leverage the information that is available through the various Infor channels. These guidelines are based on our multi-tenant implementation experience and the ongoing support we have provided afterwords.

Note:
In the sections below, we have included the Knowledge Base (KB) references that you can access by searching in the Infor Xtreme Support Portal –  ask your local admin to add you there if not already.

#1. Understand the Multi-tenant M3 Cloud Edition Release Cycle

Throughout the year there will regular maintenance and you will be able to access the schedule up of updates so that you can align them with your annual calendar.

Monthly maintenance 

The beauty of the multi-tenant SaaS platform is that you don’t need  to worry about upgrades. Infor have monthly maintenance windows planned which involves outage window for every data centre across the world, as per the published schedule.

In a much simpler  process than before multi-tenant, any incidents reported to Xtreme that result in fixes are simply rolled out in a planned monthly maintenance window. Currently there is a short downtime for this window, as per the calendar, but Infor have zero downtime for maintenance on their roadmap.

Before every maintenance window Infor publishes release notes to provide visibility on the upcoming changes in the system, and important for customer to go through that.

KB 2053402 – Multi-Tenant Release Deployment Calendar – Production Environment

KB 1952072 – Infor M3 CE – Cloud Updates (monthly)

Each new release includes a number of new features which you can test and switch on when you are ready.

Your tenant admin is advised to visit program CMS975 on monthly basis to review various new features released by Infor.

Each entry in there has NCR (net change report) number which is the unique identifier for the feature. Associated workflow helps customer to track feature review.

 

Disruptive changes

Twice every year Infor are planning to introduce disruptive changes which is a MUST for the customer to review in advance and take appropriate action. Most of these changes are to improve the services, and make outdated stuff redundant.

KB 2065737 – M3 Cloud Edition (M3 CE) – Early Announcement of Disruptive Changes

Emergency maintenance 

These changes are critical for the platform to function so can’t wait for the monthly maintenance window, and can happen at any point during the month. Infor provides notification as early as possible so watch out for those as well.

It is very important for you to subscribe for maintenance related notifications from Infor.

Apart from this, you’ll have find notifications related to critical items which may have direct/indirect impact to Infor applications. You can subscribe to receive those notifications over email.

KB 2038003 – M3 CE – Critical Notifications and Warnings

For example – Recently some of you may have seen multiple emails on critical notification related to Chrome 80 release.
Critical Notification: Infor M3 products on-premise, Single-tenant or Multi-tenant Action required to adopt to Chrome 80

#2 Participate in Customer Success Webinars

Ask your implementation partner or customer success manager to subscribe you for regular webinars arranged by customer success team.

#3 Leverage IDM Output Management

Infor is delivering new documents and reports every month, based on configurable multi-level XML file. Standard XML file includes the most used fields, but Infor customers can add fields to the XML from all tables.

KB 1974263 – M3 CE Core Output Management

# 4 Access Product documentation

There is a lot of good information available here, especially the ones from admin or user guide perspective for you to refer to.

We can help

Last but not least, reach out to us, or your implementation partner for any help in upskilling in-house team so you don’t feel ERP maintenance as a burden, or if you would like to understand anything more about the Infor multi-tenant cloud solution.

If you are considering Infor Cloud solutions also read:

Unlocking the Potential of the Infor Multi-tenant Cloud

Tech Blog: The Evolution of Extending M3

ComActivity Infor Cloud Solutions