Have you made the switch to the cloud?  If so, would you provide an update?  How well did the migration go?  Successes, take aways, ongoing issues?  Our facility is preparing to make this move too.  Thank you.

Even with all of these cons - the co$t savings are potentially very great and may be worth the drastic increase in the number of headaches given to your internal IT resources.

Just went live this weekend.  We upgraded from 9.0.1 to 10 at the same time.  Just a few recommendations:

1.  Important:  If possible, upgrade before you move to the cloud.  Get your users familiar with the look and feel of the upgrade so they don't think all the changes they find are go live issues.  It can be very confusing for them to determine what is an issue vs. a change/difference.  (I hear all the "but what about difference training?", yes we did it, lots of it)

2.  Support has been good one minute/slow the next so be prepared. (This surprised me.)  I can only assume they are very busy. 

3.  Double and triple check the amount of server space you have after every test and finally check again right before go live.  (we had to double our Websphere space on day one)  Do not assume what you had in test one is what you will have when you go live.  Request a sizing assessment each time. 

4.  Triple test any custom "anything".... if it was done for portal, test in mingle, lso....  we have struggled with customs that worked and still work in portal but not in LSO. 

Good Luck!

Has anyone experienced increased slowness since moving the Cloud environment?  If so, do you know the cause and how to improve response time?  We have experienced intermittent slowness when switching forms since our transition.  Infor had us install Fiddler to capture the information, but they tell us that the Fiddler files have not shown them the necessary information. 

     We moved to the cloud five weeks ago.  We upgraded to v10 at the same time as the cloud move because our existing servers did not meet specifications to upgrade to v10.  Even though our support tickets state that we are a Cloud customer, we still get responses from support telling us to send them log files - which we can't access since we are Cloud hosted.

Hi Judi,

At least from my perspective, your experience is not unique. We also tend to experience severe slowness in the cloud suite in the afternoons here  (CST).

We are currently investigating our own system slowness, which we believe may be linked to Amazon Cloud issues, or due to support in other timezones. We are investigating a few theories -from support (or some other automated service) performing backups/maintenance on another timezone (where it's night there, but not here) to other becoming-more-known issues with poor amazon cloud performance. 

Also, regarding Infor support - that seems to be the status quo. I used to select the specific version of my environment when opening tickets, only to have them ask me my version. Every. Single. Time. They don't even appear to have a system to track customer setup profiles accurately. I no longer select any of the options when opening a ticket, I just include all the information as a sort of signature, and still need to inform them every time that "we are a managed services client... so no, I can't run that commandline option on the server".

~Peter

We have been live on Amazon Cloud since September 21st.  Too much to put in one post however....

Speed - System slowness has been difficult.  We have been resized twice since going live.  I advise you double and triple check what your salesperson recommends.  Once you start testing ask for proof of sizing along the way.  Pre plan how your internal resources will test connection/transaction speeds.  There are times it took over 15 seconds for a form to return data.
We did our own analysis at different times of the day/night to determine the speed of the system.  Fiddler was not much help to us.  We provided our results to AMS/Cloud/Support and anyone else who would listen.  We were finally moved to a large server and/or faster processor.  My understanding is we are currently on the largest server available.

Unix to SQL - Reporting - It was not discussed with the team the challenges our end users would face with ODBC reporting.  Because we moved to SQL, our reports ran into each other by "locking" the tables when reporting against them.  We are trying to rewrite every single ODBC report to not lock tables. This did contribute to some of our slowness and on some occasions our disconnect.  Too long of a story to tell........We had to use a replicated database and it had to be set with read uncommitted snapshot to prevent deadlocking.

Testing - Do not skip anything in UAT testing.  Ask your end users to prove they have tested everything at least once. Screen shots are helpful along with their step by step processes.   Focus on enhanced forms/processes/PF/links to 3rd party software (ImageNow)/LSO and anything in which tools like DS where used.  Again, use UAT to test everything in the system including your interfaces.  I know it will be a painful experience for your users but if there is an issue you will be asked to provide PROOF of success, if you had it, in testing.  Remember, you lose the ability to troubleshoot your system.  Think of it as trying to help the old GSC  or any type of Support "recreate" an issue on "their" servers.  That is exactly what is happening to you in the cloud.    You are on "their" servers. 

Security -  ISS  Interesting Issues with this tool.  Courion creates our user accounts and adds it into LSF and Landmark strictly for ESS.  If the users need elevated access that requires an NT ID you must request it from Infor.  Once you get it however you can not edit the original user account in the ISS tool.  You must delete the entire LSF and Landmark user account, manually re-add it through ISS with the NT ID to give them the needed access.  We have brought in several consultants to try a better way but all have agreed our work around is the only way.  At first we were NOT concerned because we were told the Sync could be run on a regular basis.  We ran it one time after going live to try and it brought PROD to its knees.  We now know better.  We are actively trying to figure this out.  Bottom line:   We are requesting the ability to edit user ID's that already exist in LSF and Landmark.  We want to edit, not delete and read. 

AMS Support - They seem to be swamped.  They can be good at times and have helped us identify issues but then used that issue repeatedly to blame issues on us and our users.  We have had to spend time proving an issue was something other than the one defaulted to on a regular basis.  Like Judi, we often find or can identify the issue prior to AMS but have to wait hours for response.  Recently we have implemented an escalation process with AMS/Cloud which is working well.  The first month was very difficult.  I will say Infor "Support" has been extremely responsive.  I give credit to the Support Director.  He has stayed on top of our issues. 

Server Issues - We have found that even if you are working an incident that leads to a recycle we have to be very, very specific what environment and what server in the tickets.  Even if it is a reopened ticket regarding the same issues/environment/server.  We are hopeful after several issues with Server maintenance and wrong restart orders being done; lessons are being learned and these type situations will go away.  The users just want to be able to come in after an update is done and do their jobs.  Too many night and hours have been spent figuring this out when the processes are well documented.  Again, I think everyone is just super busy.

System Engineer/Admin - You will be told you won't need one.  My team has determined these responsibilities do not go away.  Just the physical part of pushing the buttons on a keyboard, looking at logs and applying patches/upgrades.  Your mods and little services the admin provides you don't think about, which Infor will not do, catch up.......

I was asked by my team,to copy and past from a recent previous post done by Peter O

Validate, validate over and over

Was the install/update/data copy/migration/minor file change/configuration change/anything performed correctly?

 -Did they set you up with the proper server configuration? Heap/Nonheap Memory? Disk Space? Database?
 -Did they perform system configurations according to their documentation?
 -Did they update their hosts files properly and recycle the systems in the proper order... 
 -Did they perform the upgrade steps correctly?
 -Is the grid up and running (landmark)
 -Check the system logs....
 -Latency issues - AWS hosting can lag, so you may need to keep up on your network setup depending on how you integrate with the systems. (you might have mysterious timeout issues)
 -Make sure you schedule UPDATES for your system - I'm talking the VM & "physical" server. If you use windows - make sure you have security patching scheduled immediately or *cough**cough* you may find your server a few years behind on security updates, and you might find a few common web vulnerabilities delivered with the WAS setup. (Needless to say, "always up to date & secure " is intended to be taken loosely)
 -Security Security Security. Did I mention look at your security setup?

My teams adds to this list.....  check with your internal security Firewall access...  This one bit us repeatedly.

Hi, we are considering moving our locally hosted Lawson 10 environment to the Infor Cloud (or possible upgrading to the Infor Lawson Xi platform while moving to the Cloud). Peter, Carl and Tracy thank you for your informative postings. Can you or anyone else provide any updated information/experiences with moving to the Infor Cloud environment?