Epicor understands the value that mass participation and collaboration, with the Web as an enabler, can bring to business. Substantial advances and the ongoing maturity of the consumer web have brought new levels of productivity and self-evident usability to today’s technology consumers. Even the rise in social computing and related technologies has an outlet in enterprise business software, and are manifested in capabilities such as enterprise search and presence. Epicor ICE merges these emerging technologies, often referred to as Web 2.0 with Epicor True SOA™ to deliver unprecedented support for harnessing knowledge, rapidly finding information, and taking collaborative actions upon it.
Enterprise Content Management Enterprise content management (ECM) supports paperless operations and reduces document control costs by enabling users to easily add documents and retrieve information from nearly everywhere within the system. Epicor ECM delivers essential attachment/document management capabilities by extending them to include use of Microsoft SharePoint (SQL Server) document repositories. This means that document versioning is also supported along with the option to integrate to other best-of-breed document management systems.
Enterprise Search Today’s business workers are typically savvy internet users in their personal lives and have come to expect the same sort of access and community in their business lives. By utilizing Web 2.0 technologies and the building blocks of Microsoft Search, such as SQL Full Text Indexing, Epicor delivers “Enterprise Search”, a "Google" like search tool that brings the personal internet experience to the workplace. Enterprise Search provides embedded search capabilities through tag clouds of Epicor structured data that span all Epicor applications built upon it and extends beyond enterprise data, to un-structured data (Word documents, etc) if desired, and in a secure manner. Epicor Enterprise Search also supports extensible actions from search results including task specific actions, internal and external web service calls and direct links to applications or application forms in context.
Subscription Services Epicor ICE extends really simple syndication (RSS) subscription capabilities to Epicor application data. This means that business users may subscribe to specific information that they wish to be kept appraised of. One area where this is enabled is within Epicor Portal, where the entire schema of Epicor applications is accessed for end-user query development and web deployment. By subscribing to a particular query using RSS, users will see information proactively pushed to them when the data behind that query changes. For example, a user may wish to attach an RSS feed to a particular contact at a customer site. Any time something happens to that contact they can receive a note about it. RSS information can be pushed to your container of choice including the RSS Feeds Outlook Syndicated Content (RSS) Directory within Microsoft Office or via Windows Vista Gadgets.
Composite Applications Enabled by the Epicor Everywhere™ Framework, Epicor application Web forms generated from XML metadata, and their related linked business logic, can be used in composite application development. Each web form supports publication and subscription, allowing specific business functionality to be “mashed-up” with other line of business developments.
Mobile Enabled by the Epicor Everywhere™ Framework, Epicor application Web forms generated from XML metadata, and their related linked business logic, can be accessed via mobile device. Additionally, Epicor EPM key performance indicators (KPIs) can also be deployed direct to mobile devices and include full search capabilities to rapidly find and drill-down to applicable data.
Document Management Reduce document control costs by enabling users to easily retrieve information related to quotes, parts and jobs from a wide variety of third-party applications. This capability is extremely useful for viewing, markup and hyper linking drawings and other documents on the shop floor, benchmarking production information and maintaining quality documents.
Epicor Everywhere Framework™ Today many enterprise applications are being rewritten to support mobile devices and browser-based clients, which provide easier more convenient access to business information and easier deployment. These clients are generally considered “zero-footprint” or “thin” clients. Rather than rewriting our application forms to support mobile devices and the web, we developed the Epicor Everywhere™ Framework, a unique technology that stores all client business logic as tagged XML metadata. This permits Epicor applications to run as smart clients or Web clients or on mobile devices, all from the same source code. This framework also ensures that user customizations and personalization remain intact, whatever the UI.
For example, you can customize your smart client forms to meet your specific business needs and then simply re-generate the form’s metadata and output it as a web form with all customizations included. Epicor ICE supports generation of asynchronous Java and extensible markup language (AJAX) web browser-based forms from existing Windows forms (C#.NET). For added flexibility web forms can be accessed from different mobile devices and browsers, including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox or Apple Safari and can run on any operating system, including Windows, UNIX, Linux, or Mac.
