Introduction

Generally Sage 300 ERP is used in a multi-user environment where users could be distributed across a large building or located in many different sites. Further Sage 300 ERP uses a concurrent licensing model for users, so if you have 10 Lanpaks then 10 people can login at once; however, it doesn’t matter which ten people it is.

Often companies save a bit of money by buying fewer Lanpaks than users of the product. Perhaps a clerk works the early shift of 7-3 and then when they go home a Financial Accountant runs some Financial Reports. But what happens if that clerk doesn’t sign off? What if they work at home and aren’t answering their phone? Now the Financial Accountant gets a message that all the Lanpaks are in use and can’t get their work done.

Evicting Users

To solve this problem Sage 300 ERP 2014 Product Update 2 will be introducing an Evict Users feature. Previously we provided a detailed list of everyone in the system and what they are doing which I blogged on here.  Now you can also kick them out of the system to recover the Lanpak for someone else to use.

From the Current Users screen there is now a push button to “Sign Out Selected Users”. You then get a dialog with a dire warning and are requested to enter the admin password and confirm to kick out the desired user.

Then in a minute or so, all the screens for that user will be terminated and their Lanpaks will be available for someone else to use.

Technical Details

So how is this accomplished? Basically when you evict a user, that screen will store an encrypted file in the shared data folder. Periodically any Lanpak Managers running will have a look to see if there is a new file and if there is it will see if it is for users they are managing. If so, Lanpak manager will kill the processes of all the screens they are running. The file is left in place for a few minutes, so this particular user won’t be able to sign in again immediately.

This is a fairly simple scheme that is fairly effective for recovering Lanpaks. It works both for regularly run screens from the desktop as well as web deployed screens from the Web Desktop or from Sage CRM.

Since it’s by user, you can kill the ADMIN user which will kill yourself. If all your users sign in as ADMIN then it will kill all the users on the system. So beware that if multiple users share a user id, then they will all be killed and not just one workstations.

Performing Upgrades

Another use case that this method only partially addresses is kicking everyone out of the system so you can perform an upgrade (like a Product Update). Generally a DLL or EXE file in Windows is locked if a running process uses it. Hence you can’t update Sage 300 if someone has a4wapi.dll in use for instance. It could be that this method does gets everyone out of the system, but there are a few cases which may not work:

• If someone signs off the Sage 300 Desktop but leaves it running. In this case the EXE and DLLs are still in use, but since it isn’t using a Lanpak and isn’t associated with a user, it can’t be killed this way. However I tend to think this is fairly unlikely.
• It won’t be effective against things that quickly open sessions, do something and then close the session. This would include things like the Sage CRM integration where the custom Sage CRM pages open a session load their data and close the session. However things like this tend to be Web Servers and can usually be stopped remotely or at least from a central place.
• Things that we allow to use Sage 300 without using a Lanpak. This would include things like parts of the Sage CRM integration, the Sage HRMS integration and the Sage 300 Portal.
• For third party products, if they are full SDK, it will definitely work on them. If they aren’t full SDK it may or may not work depending on how they are built.

Keep in mind that the main purpose of this feature is to manage Lanpaks, performing upgrades is just a secondary things, where hopefully it helps, but may not be a complete solution.

The Scary Warning

The warning message when you run this is fairly severe. Part of this is because we are killing the processes that are connected to our API. Generally you won’t corrupt the main database because everything is protected by transactioning. So if you do kill the process while they are say posting a batch, it just means the transaction in process will be rolled back and they will have to do it again later. Generally the expectation is that this feature is used once people go home and aren’t doing anything which would be harmless. Further in the user list screen you can see what people are doing, so don’t kill the person running Day End.

However if someone is using the UI and they are resizing columns in a grid, you could catch things at the wrong time and corrupt a *_p.ism file. But these can be deleted and sometimes repaired with ScanIsam. If you are running a non-SDK third party product, I can’t really say what will happen if it’s killed.

Summary

The Evict Users feature is the number one feature as voted on, on our Ideas web site and this is now in the product. So keep making suggestions to https://www11.v1ideas.com/Sage300ERP/Accpac and voting on suggestions that are in the system that you would like to see implemented.

This features will make it easier for companies to manage their Lanpaks and get better value from the system. Hopefully this will also make managing upgrades a bit easier as well.