Yellow Notes in Aurena

Hi @SORSITEL,

At the moment this functionality is not available in Aurena.

Anyone know if this feature is coming in a future update?

I don't believe it's in the plans at the moment. 

Is there some other functionality replacing it? Will the data survive the UI switch? It’s good to know what happens to all the notes that are added via IEE when you switch later to Aurena.

JukkaJ,

I'm not involved in the R&D part of IFS and can see that the table(s) holding the data (fnd_note_book_tab and fnd_note_page_tab) will be deprecated at some moment. Until then, you, we, I, R&D have to come up with a solution. I have a customer that is heavily using this feature on customer orders. I'm thinking of a custom tab that shows all the sticky notes. Not sure yet how to enter a new one. So some sort of journal or notes.

Steve

Least what we can do is prepare a proper backup of the mentioned tables.

We are using it rather lot on transmitting extra info regarding construction projects whose lifespan can be 5 or more years even. The sticky notes are not very liked because they are always on the way and have to be moved around. We have a custom feature in use for entering manual log entries for projects and that could be the place to migrate the sticky notes contents before the switch to Aurena. It could and probably should be done already in IEE to get rid of the stickies.

But the sticky notes can be used everywhere and what I described above is only one certain view where it has been used. So the notes used elsewhere still have to be backed up and transferred somewhere else.

Hi @anmise or @Banu Liyanapathirana are you able to confirm whether the yellow sticky notes are indeed planned to be deprecated, and if so what the estimate timeframe for this is?

Are you also able to confirm there are no plans to support them in Aurena?

It will not be deprecated on Apps10 but at the moment you only see the sticky notes in IEE. 

As for Aurena support going forward, I know it is a feature that RnD know is appreciated, but as for any firm plans on what shape or form it will take when/if it comes back, I don't have any answers at this point. 

Sticky Notes are currently not in the plan. They do not feel like something that belongs in the current web-based UI, at least not in the form they had previously. Also, we were working from an assumption that Sticky Notes was something that was quite popular in demos, but not really used by customers. From the examples that I’ve heard here it sounds like some customers are using them instead of custom fields to save some additional information. Not that much for collaboration (which was the driving idea behind Sticky Notes).

We use sticky notes quite a bit.

They’re stored in RTF format on the database. Converting rich text and images to HTML or plaintext is a nontrivial task.

We use the sticky notes a fair bit for collaboration but also in a digital equivalent of a physical sticky note.

E.g. when raising a purchase req i’ll often leave a sticky note for the procurement team if I really want the specific item (as sometimes they’ll get an alternative product which might not do exactly what I need as well) or for links to suggested suppliers websites if its a non-regular item order.

or

“xxx called yyy and will follow up on zzz” or “spoke to xxx who will yyy” etc.

They’re used pretty heavily here - not saying there’s perhaps not a better way or we couldn’t adapt but just that they are very much used and appreciated. Removal of them would be a big adjustment for our organisation.

I have the same experience from when I was a customer. It’s a very nice ‘in your face’ feature to highlight something. We used the extensively in a number of different ways and also had events to automatically create them based on certain criteria for ‘special task’ that were received through an integration. It’s something that we should definitely keep in some shape or form!

Hi @SORSITEL and @Mark.Feldpausch 

Since we received more questions and feedback on Sticky Notes, we would really appreciate if you also could mention why you appreciate having Sticky (Yellow) Notes and how useful it is, and what exactly are the underlying “problems” that sticky notes solve, so that we could inform R&D on the business critical nature and how useful this feature is to customers :)

Thanks & Best Regards,
Yasas

What we do, is we extract the raw text using a java class, it’s lightning fast, and gets us the content (which is what we care about at least, not the formatting).

That’s true.

They’re mostly used for clearly communicating (like “in your face”) what needs to be done/corrected (especially with expense sheets and invoices).

What we care about is that there’s a relatively easy way for our users to do this, without having to use Outlook every time.

But yes, I agree that they need to change to be better suited for the web UI.

I think the main value, at least for us, is that they allow easy collaboration/communication of needed action on things like invoices, orders, activities and other areas with high levels of interface/cross-collaboration.
 

They could do the same with Teams, Outlook, Slack, you name it, but nothing beats the simplicity of having it directly in IFS.

I like to think of it as Attachments, but for text. You could put attachments on a windows file share, which is kind of like the same as using a separate program for communicating actions.

Sticky notes is a feature that our users use every single day,.  The simplicity and ease of use is hard to beat.  The ability to communicate something temporarily in the context of a specific transaction and have that communication be obvious is a feature that our users would miss a great deal.

While it has limitations, our users understand those limitations and work accordingly.

There’s a reason why the real paper sticky notes are still sold in office supply stores - people buy them and use them and there’s nothing else quite like it.

Yellow (Sticy) Notes are extremely important.  They are used to alert the user to special circumstances to the record being displayed on the screen.   The reason that they are important is that the functionality is available on almost all screens of IFS and that they stand out to the user, not a little “Notes” checkbox, but an in your face alert.

What would enhance the functionality:

1. Have them stored in the database where they can not be easily erased and where they can be retrieved for later use.
2. Enriched text would be a nice to have, even if it is only limited to the options in this comment box.

Sticky Notes is the primary driver for our customer service collaboration.  Our users use it every day.  It is the only way they have to insure that key information on a transaction (customer order, purchase order, whatever) is seen.  It’s in your face, you have to move it to see whatever is behind it.  There’s no way someone can say “I didn’t notice it.”  Use has only increased since we moved to working from home.

I just did a quick check in our system.  Since Jan 1, 2020 - we’ve created or modified 25K Yellow Notes on 27 different LUs.  The LUs with the most notes in that time are Customer Order, Purchase Order, and Business Opportunity.  The number is 4K since August 1, 2020.

We use sticky notes very frequently for communication and collaboration. We have them on almost every Customer Order, Customer, and Project because it shows information very visibly to any person that goes to that record. 

I don’t think it needs to be a STICKY in Aurena, but some functionality needs to exist to serve that purpose. A migration plan also needs to exist to move existing stickies into Aurena.

Our users heavily use sticky notes in all areas of the application as a means of simple and imediately visible information for communication. it communicates specific information that can not be handled anywhere else in the application.

it also allows to handle pictures or weblinks, which is frequently used.

Hi All,
I have directed a summary of all your concerns and requirement to product development (R&D), and hopefully we will have an update soon from R&D :)
Best Regards,
Yasas

Supply Chain

1. Sticky notes- 
   1. They are important for communicating on Customer orders acting as a pop up message in quickly alert the user if a issue.
   2. Shop Order to communicate internally. They may use Note field but they are not easily noticed.
   3. Obsoleted inventory items to quickly alert someone of the reason why it was obsoleted.

              Everyone would like to have sticky notes in Aurena.  They are a very easy way to communicate information.

As a customer we use Sticky Notes through the system, as a quick “in your face” notes when someone enters a screen:  customer orders, purchase orders,  purchase requisitions, shop orders, posting proposals, RMA’s, Work Orders.  The loss of the Sticky Note would be a major loss for us.  Please reconsider or come up with an equivalent solution.