Infor Federation Services - Lessons Learned, Mistakes Made


When the company I was with first implemented IFS we made a lot of mistakes, quite frankly because no one told us the right way to do it. We followed steps that seemed to make sense from past processes in the Infor Lawson world, but which didn't work well in this IFS, ION, & BOD world we were moving to.

Security Roles - we created all of the security roles (from Lawson, Landmark, GHR & EAM) in IFS instead of feeding them from these systems via the Security Role Master BODs. This created problems when we later tried to utilize some features of 'role control' from GHR.

You can default roles on job/positions in GHR and we were hoping to automate removing roles when someone changed their job/position. The problem was that the roles in IFS were tied to multiple Logical IDs and simply removing them in GHR (and feeding those updates to IFS) didn't work.

When we removed the role from the user in GHR and sent the process security user master BOD to IFS, IFS didn't remove the role from that user (because it was associated to multiple Logical IDs) and the sync security user master BOD back to GHR added the role again.

Mistake made, lesson learned. Only associate one Logical ID to a Role by using the Sync Security Role Master BOD to add them into IFS with the Logical ID of the sending system.

Another issue we encountered in role maintenance - because we didn't understand our new world - was not cleaning up roles in Lawson that had been added only for the sake of using ISS sync with Landmark.

The old process required all Lawson security roles to be built in Landmark and all Landmark roles to be built in Lawson in order to keep the users in sync via ISS. This is not a requirement when security if maintained by IFS.

This duplication just clutters up IFS by associating both Logical IDs to these roles, especially since most users don't need access to non-GHR/FSM Landmark. [Yes, Virginia, there are two different Landmarks.]

Mistake made, lesson learned. Before migrating to IFS, take a look at your current setup and take the time to clean up what's no longer going to be required.

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