Am interested to know how companies store or archive std reports such as PR134, PR141, PR160, etc.

We are moving from 7.2.2.7 on iSeries to 9.0 on Windows. Currently use a product called LaserVault for report archiving; a process is set up that LV grabs certain reports from Print Manager and stores them. The reports remain in PM until users delete them (which rarely happens). Set-up is fairly simple for iSeries; looks more complex with Windows, and we're just looking for what others are doing.

What we're seeing with 9.0 is that a job run today with same job name as one run last week gets overwritten. Our Payroll users vastly prefer to work in the LID rather than in Portal. They don't want to have to re-name the PR141 etc every time they run it, and they probably don't want to switch over to Portal, open the report, and save to a different location for posterity either.

Any thoughts appreciated!
Lauren

We are on 8.03 apps and 8.03 env with all of our users now using Portal. We are a Windows/SQL shop.

Our Payroll staff save any reports they want to keep for posterity as PDF files to the network and organize them in file folders based on payroll date. Some of our users will do the same thing but then import the file into LaserFiche, our document imaging system.

This isn't a sophisticated or automatic process but it works and is easy and no one seems to be complaining.

By the way, we issue 12,000+ checks semi-monthly.

Your current method sounds much easier than what we do. We save each report as a text file (F8, Send to File, All Text, enter path and file name) to a directory on our Unix server. After the pay run is completed, all the files in that directory are copied to our archive system, DocuWare. Once we've confirmed that all reports are imaged in DocuWare, we delete them from the imaging folder so it'll be ready for the next payrun.

In order to make it easier on us to quickly find the right report, we also save those text files to a folder created for each pay run. We FTP the files from the DocuWare directory on the Unix server to our network drive, which can only be accessed by payroll staff.

It would be great to have a system as automated as your current set up!

We have stopped printing any hard copies of reports since we started using Lawson. It is so much quicker to retrieve the information you want electronically.

LaurenSH: Maybe the iSeries is different, but the jobname overwrite condition has been the norm since I can remember. It won't matter if they use LID or Portal: if the username and jobname are the same it will overwrite the output. That's because the actual report output (*.prt and *.dtl) goes to the $LAWDIR/print directory and the /username/jobname/step make up the rest of that path.

Whatever archive method you use you'll have to save off the report to wherever before running the next one if they are run by the same user and they use the same username each time.

As for our report archiving and distribution, we use a product called 'RAS' from D.B. Technology, LLC. Each report to archive needs to be setup within RAS and it is sent to the server by creating a Lawson 'printer' for the user to send it to directly from Lawson. We also use it to split out a large report to multiple accounting units for viewing. It works okay, but we've had issues when using anything other than basic fonts such as bold, u-line, italics.

Good luck.
-GW

We do the same as ScottZ - which works fine for our users, however, we're constantly freezing up disk space because we don't have an auto-archive/print manger clean-up process. Hoping someone will post here an automated solution, so I stop receiving the nasty e-mails that I'm hosing the server.... because its all about me!!

Have a good day everyone! :wwf: