RE: possible Lawson newbie

I have worked in a Lawson 7.226 shop for over two years now and have become
familiar with many aspects of their system.  I understand version 8.x is much
better than 7.x.

I have worked on IBM Midrange for almost 30 years (guess I can call it a career
now).

My understanding about Lawson 7.x is that it is maintained on a Unix system in
Cobol and run through a cobol2rpg converter to get it on the iSeries.  I can
attest that their rpg code has little if any useful inline documentation.  From
a pgmrs standpoint it is convoluted spaghetti with no sauce or parmesan.

Their tech support staff is good after you get to tier 1.  They are responsive
and helpful unless the application won't do what you need.

The 7.x front end is a Windows 3.1 type application called LID.  The security is
extremely difficult to navigate as is the way the system submits and manages
jobs.

If you are considering a Siebel front end to Lawson 7.x using MQ forget it as it
doesn't work properly and you will be lost in a maze of fingerpointers.

If 8.x is not a great improvement and your industry is not specifically served
by Lawson (check references not marketing material) then I suggest you might
look elsewhere. 

Jerry



Quoting phil Kestenbaum <pkestenbaum@xxxxxxxxx>:

> Lawson runs I believe on 3 platforms. Iseries, Windows, and Unix. I believe
> the ISeries platform is best for Lawson, having been to their technical
> conferences and heard their Unix and Windows Cobol horror stories. On the
> Iseries it has been written in ILE for many years and I understand they have
> moved to Java more heavily.
> See if you can get to a technical conference in the near future, that is the
> best place to hear the real deal.
> 
> HTH,
> Phil Kestenbaum
> Systems Admin
> G-III Leather Fashions
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Craig Otway
> Sent: Tue 6/28/2005 5:56 PM
> To:   midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> Cc:   
> Subject:      possible Lawson newbie
> 
> I am a MVS guy looking for real answers to a possible new Lawson
> implementation.  We would be running Lawson in a ASP(application service
> provider) format and our current box does not run DB2 v8. This leads us to
> the other side(AS400, AIX, UNIX/Oracle, iSeries). I think I would only
> consider MS for the webserver.   
> 
> 1. Any of you Lawson 8+ users on AS400 wish you were on another platform?
> 2. What platforms would you pick for the (webserver, app server, db server)?
> 3. If we currently have 3000 concurrent users on our MVS box, what would that
> be on an  iSeries / AS400 or are we taking server farm? 
> 4. What obstacles to implementation should we focus on?
>  
> 
>  Any recommendations or suggestions on Lawson, platform, db, OS...... would
> be great. Thanks.
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