Landmark 101 for LSF Administrators

Join RPI while we present Landmark 101 for LSF administrators, Part of our Winter Webinar Wonderland series. This webinar features special guest Jeremy Stoltzfus delivering his widely acclaimed presentation on the nuances of Landmark administration.

Keith: My name is Keith Wayland from RPI. I want to thank all of you for taking the time to attend this very special presentation. We started doing these live webinars about a year and a half ago. A lot of success, they’re very popular. Today we’re honored to have a very special, Mr. Jeremy Stoltzfus from Penn State Hershey Medical Center, delivering a presentation on administering Landmark for old school LSF system administrators. It’s a very popular presentation that he’s delivered at the Keystone if I’m not mistaken. We’re very excited to host him today.

Before I hand off, a couple of quick house keeping notes. One is there is a live video feed, you should be able to toggle between the video feed and the PowerPoint as you like on your computer. Second, Jeremy loves questions so if you have any questions please type them into the GoToWebinar questions module and we’ll ask them as the opportunity arises. It helps improve the dynamic of the overall presentation. Thirdly, and most importantly, we will be recording this and will be putting it up on YouTube and you will able to see that link later and share it. Without further ado I give you Mr. Jeremy Stoltzfus.

Jeremy: Thanks. Thanks Keith. Thanks for having me here. It’s a pleasure to be able to do this and share this information. A little bit about my organization that I work for. I work for Penn State Hershey Medical Center. We are an academic medical center with about eleven thousand employees currently. We are like all other healthcare entities in the middle of several mergers and acquisitions. We had our first major acquisition July first. We’ve got another planned coming up this fall and then another one talking early spring. We’ve got a lot of activity. By the end, a year from now, we could be about twenty thousand employees with all the acquisitions that we’re looking at. We have been a Lawson customer running the full S3 suite of applications since about 2000.

A little bit about me personally. I’m twelve years as a Lawson system administrator on LSF. I started with version 7.3.3 environment and 7.2.4 applications. I’ve been through several major upgrades though that, you can see the list here. Also, since I’ve been at Hershey I’ve been a part of some major implementations. Implemented LBI, mobile supply chain just recently. Actually our hospital had it and then decommissioned it and then purchased it again. We implemented Process Flow Integrator, the previous process automation tool and then went through the Landmark IPA upgrade to migrate all of our process flows from that tool into Landmark. The most recent two, the Global HR and talent acquisition module, which we went live with that in June of this past year. The Infor expense management tool, which is live as of just about a few weeks ago.

We’ve got a lot of major things going on in our organization. I’m part of a team in IT that maintains our Lawson system and keeps it running. Yeah, just keep the system up and running. When I think about Lawson system administration, I’ve been doing it for years and comparing and contrasting to Landmark. As I go through this presentation I’m going to go through some of the things that are the same, some of the things that are maybe similar, and then some of the things that are different or brand new.

First of all, startlaw/stoplaw. As system admins these commands still exist. I list these specific as examples but really there’s a lot of command line utilities that do very much the same thing as LSF. The GEN database, there’s still a gen database that exists. That’s all the metadata about the environment and the application. It’s how the system is set up and configured. Landmark does allow you to install multiple data areas, it’s similar to S3. You can create multiple data areas of the same application and have different instances of that. A perfect example of this is in your testing environment, typically you might have two or three data areas within your test environment.

The technology stack design overall is very similar. At the bottom you’ve got the database, sitting on top of that you’ve got the environment. In LSF it was the LSF environment, Lawson System Foundation, now in Landmark it’s the Landmark Technology Stack, very different technologies but the base structure is still the s