Introduction
Shop Views are primarily used by employees who perform scheduled activities to:
- See what work should be performed next based on the current schedule.
- Report the status of work that is underway.
This information is seen and input using the Shop Views dialog.
The number of users that can be simultaneously logged in to a Shop Views client is specified in your license file and can be viewed in the About APS dialog (Help | About…). Note that if a client crashes or is shut down unexpectedly this can leave licenses in use. To free these licenses, restart the APS Extra Services service.
Deployment
Setting up Shop Views involves the following:
- Make sure that the APS Extra Services service is running. This service is the centerpiece for communications between the APS Service and the Shop View clients. This service is installed on the same computer as the APS Service. If the service is not running then the Shop Views application will fail to start.
- Specify in the User’s dialog (Data | Users…) these settings that affect Shop Views:
- Can View Shop Views: If false, then this User cannot login to Shop Views or be added in the Shop View Options dialog to particular Resources.
- Can Change Job Status: This is only used for Resources that do not have specific Users assigned. If checked then the User can update the status and data collection values in Shop Views. If unchecked, then the Shop Views are made read-only.
- Jump to Next Op in Shop Views: If checked then when an Activity is Finished and saved, the next ready Activity scheduled (across all Resources) for the User is shown.
- Prompt for Shop Views Save: If checked then when an Activity is edited, the user is prompted to save before logging out or moving to another Activity. If unchecked then changes are saved without prompting.
- Define Shop View Options using the Shop View Options Dialog (Data | Shop Views…).
- Make the Shop Views client exe available to the remote computers that will be running Shop Views. This can be done in either of these three ways:
- Web Sharing (recommended): This allows for running Shop Views from a browser. To set this up, in Explorer click on the ShopViews folder that contains APSShopViews.exe, go to Web Sharing, and Share the folder. To run Shop Views, simply enter the path to the folder in Explorer — something similar to: http://192.168.0.101/MySharedFolder/APSShopViews.exe
- Folder Sharing: Share the folder containing APSShopViews.exe and create a shortcut on client computers to launch the application.
- Copy files: Copy the contents of the Shop Views folder to each client. (This is not recommended because it will require more work to update the clients in the future.)