Insights 2018 - What happened to Social?

Anyone know what’s going on with Social? There were quite a few sessions on this last year, but I haven’t seen/heard anything for this year.

There was a bit of internal concern of over exposure and customer fatigue from a few ‘hallways conversations’ I overheard. Same with Mobile CRM. They have been used at every keynote for a few years. They are not going anywhere. The new UI stack (Kinetic), Connected Factory, ISV, Azure announcements were the king of the show and you can infer roadmap from that statement safe harbor :wink:

I keep hearing about the anticipation for this, but apparently I completely missed it when I was at Insights.
What is Kinetic?

It was brought up in the opening keynote:

Think of a web framework with design standards (like Google’s Material Design) and a TypeScript (JavaScript) plumbing to build responsive web apps. I don’t expect a complete move to the Kinetic UI right away but for specific applications from here on. One suggestion was a Kinetic version of MES - runable in a browser, on a tablet or on a phone. Also, I think Active Desktop will be a target sooner rather than later.

So if I’m Epicor (I’m not and I know nothing), this is a great step for me to start making my product more cloud (private or otherwise) friendly across all of the Epicor product lines. I’m an ERP customer but I need some distribution capabilities? I can “borrow” some P21 code running in the cloud. EDD embedding? No sweat.

Personally, I think it’s a brilliant strategy.

Mark W.

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From what I understood it may be part of the SDK module which is quite expensive. As a customer, I can’t justify it to use it to build our own apps.

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I agree Mark! I am excited about Kinetic as well. Great to see the UI and UX getting some love!

Pedro you are correct initially, but one of the sessions I set through, as Mark said, stated it would make it down to the toolbox customization we are used too. It will just take time for the tools to get developed and matured a little to make it to that level. Very exciting to see Kinetic!

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Oh yeah! They has “safe harbor” all over that presentation of course :slight_smile:

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That’s right @jeowings, this is only the beginning. They need to be able to deliver a similar Customization experience that we have with the Rich Client. I’m hoping that the vars and 3rd party developers (and key customers) work with Epicor to create these tools that make it easier to test and maintain customizations within the Kinetic framework. I don’t think we’ll see much until next Insights though.

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If they charge for the SDK to use this it is dead on arrival.

Since you brought up SDK. They should make it free and get a competitive advantage by on-boarding ERP Developers and skyrocketing their ecosystem and drowning other ERP Vendors in the process. You are as powerful as your community / apps / plugins and modules. =) was I speaking out loud oops.

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Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? SpongeHaso KericPants!

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