Tip 4: Get your browser ready

Your browser is basically equivalent to your operating system in terms of compliance and importance to JD Edwards.  You need to get it right.  There are a number of important compatibility settings, security settings, proxy exceptions (and more) that you need to ensure are pushed out to the business as part of an implementation. 

In general, URLs no longer change with an upgrade or migration of JD Edwards.  A production URL (jde.fusion5.com.au) for example, is probably well known and has all sorts of favourites saved on all sorts of machines.  Don’t change it – it’s painful.  You’ll have more calls into your helpdesk saying “JDE is broken” that you can poke a stick at.  Please keep the URL the same and you’ll have a better chance of everyone being able to login.

Ensure that you push out cache refreshes for any tools release change or any JDE change for that matter.  It’s critical to manage all of your browsers too, not just the ones that you think are being used.  How do you know what browsers you need to cater for?  Use ERP Analytics of course.  This gives you detailed mapping of users and programs to browsers.  It’ll also allow you to ensure that you are using activeX (please don’t keep relying on this) and what settings your CNC team need to put into the JAS.INI to ensure that all browsers are treated equally (well, as equally as possible).  Supporting a broad base of browsers and technologies is always going to be best.

Browser performance constantly surprises me, as the two screen grabs below will attest to.  We have two different clients that use JDE heavily, you’ll see opposite results in terms of the performance.  It really does make a HUGE difference though – 80% difference in site 1 and 30% difference in site 2 – purely based on browser choice.

Figure 4: Internet Explorer is significantly faster than Chrome, and it is clearly the browser of choice.

Figure 5: A different client sees Internet Explorer as the most popular, but 28% slower than Chrome