Infor launches Workspace social business application

Delivering contextual information in a familiar environment that mirrors social networking tools, the latest release enhances the Workspace user experience, which provides role-based information from multiple applications in a single interface with a common, sleek look-and-feel to enhance decision making across the enterprise.

The new Workspace provides companies social media-like sharing and communication tools to increase creativity and collaboration, with important protections for sensitive business and customer data in a secure environment. In addition, Workspace helps businesses address the challenge of knowledge transfer across different generations within the workforce by encouraging the sharing of information in a way that is intuitive and familiar to both younger and older generations of workers, including millennials.

Share information in real-time

"Today's consumer technology has helped people grow accustomed to communicating with their peers in a way that easily allows them to share information, collect feedback and make decisions," said Duncan Angove, president of Infor. "This release of Infor10 ION Workspace takes the familiar tools of consumer communication and applies them to the workplace, enabling companies to drive continuous improvement in a more collaborative, productive, social enterprise."

Infor10 ION Workspace provides a social engine for the enterprise, fostering a collaborative environment where users can share information with colleagues in real-time. Users create a profile to represent themselves virtually, and can join public groups, create private groups, comment on posts by others, and follow their colleagues and items that affect key customers, partners, suppliers, vendors, or other designated links in the supply chain.

Relevant, in-context data is pulled from Infor applications, and most non-Infor applications, by Infor10 ION technology and posts to the profiles of users for whom the information is relevant by role in the organisation, enabling them to track key items such as invoices, orders, shipments, and more. Users can also create posts and share them with specific groups, building a platform for multi-dimensional conversation and collaboration with colleagues regardless of location or job-function. Social conversations will be tagged with relevant information to allow for search and retrieval in the future.

Faster, more informed decisions

Using Infor10 ION technology, Workspace pulls information relevant to a user's function to enable faster decision making. By integrating multiple systems through ION, Infor is able to deliver contextual information to users through Workspace, enabling them to make faster, more informed decisions that increase the speed of business.

Workspace also advances enterprise search capabilities by enabling users to search multiple applications at once because information aggregated by ION is stored in the ION Business Vault, a repository of business documents from across the enterprise. The ION Business Vault will also store social conversations from Workspace, automatically tagging relevant contextual terms for future retrieval.

"Not since e-mail was first introduced in a business context has a technological development had such potential to change the way that people work as Infor10 ION Workspace," said Angove. "Companies that deploy Workspace can hope to achieve levels of collaboration and communication never before seen in the workplace, helping them recruit and retain young talent, excite their workforce, and drive innovation and profitability."