In short, this software is a Media Object Attachment management interface for JDEdwards® EnterpriseOne®.

Before this software was introduced, Media Object Attachments in JDEdwards® EnterpriseOne® were not easy to work with - the data is kept in different places and the pointers to attachments are encoded in database BLOB fields. Additionally, the so called "OLE Attachments" are stored in a complicated file format.

The irony is in the fact, that JDE has a reasonable and sufficiently flexible built-in Document Management system, which cannot really be made useful without this add-on software, because it does not provide any standard convenient and flexible programmatic interfaces.

One Attachment Manager software introduces an easy-to-use and user-friendly interface to work with attachments:

• Retrieving the text attachments;
• Retrieving the file names of any attached files;
• Retrieving OLE Attachments off the STG files used by JDE (this new function is available at an additioonal fee);
• Adding new text and file attachments.

With minimal programming, it will allow external systems to link documents (files, images, text, etc.) to OneWorld or read the existing OneWorld attachment details (such as file locations, types, text, etc.) back to an external system.

The core software is delivered as both a DLL and a set of Active-X Automation objects. Typically, a DLL will be used from C and C++ code, while Active-X objects will be used from Visual Basic and similar languages.

On top of this, we include a few complementary pieces of software, designed to use, as well as to illustrate the use of, the power of One Attachment Manager:

• PrintAttachment.exe - a Windows® console (command-line) utility to print any supported attachments from a command prompt or a script;
• A collection of native JDEdwards® EnterpriseOne® C BSFN wrappers to all functions in this package;
• AddAttachment.vbs - a Windows® VB script to attach a new file to any specified JDEdwards® EnterpriseOne® entity;
• OpenAllImageAttachments.vbs - a Windows® VB script to open all specified JDEdwards® EnterpriseOne® entity's Image attachments - in the imaging applications, associated with the attached files' extensions;
• AutoAttach.exe - a Windows® console (command-line) utility to bulk-attach Image, Text (TXT or RTF) or File attachments from a command prompt or a script. This powerful utility processes all files in a given directory, interpreting the file names to construct the MO Key and optionally copies the attached files into the MO Queue and deletes the original file. The files will need to have all of the MO Keye elements in their names, i.e.: all files named "AB ######.JPG" can be bul-attached to the Address Book records, using "ABGT" MO DSTR and interpreting the "######" from the file names as the AB Number of the target record - for each file. Up to 32 MO Key elements are supported.
  
  Typically, the files can be created manually (i.e.: scanned images, named on save accordingly) or automatically generated (i.e.: coming out of Create!Print) and streamed into a pre-defined folder for subsequent processing by AutoPrint, which can then be scheduled to run periodically through Windows Scheduler, to attach any accumulated files to their respective records, copy the files into the destination MO Queue(s) and then delete the original files, so that it would not process them multiple times.
  
  For example, at one JDE site, Jet Forms is splitting Purchase Orders, Invoices, Dockets, etc. into separate PDF files, changes the file names to include the MO Key elements and saves them into a directory, where a periodically running AutoAttach command is retrieving the files from, copying them into selected MO Queues and attaches the files back to the respective lines in JDE, making all of their documents readily available for re-printing and reference. This entire Document Management system costed under US$1,500, including installation (it only requires MO Writer Object to operate and the other tools are all included in the package) and took 1 day to setup and test! No other document management software is currently capable of delivering anything even remotely comparable. Cost-wise, this would compare to approx. 1-2 man-days of consulting services, to simply start discussing this requirement, let alone implementing it.
• SaveAllOLEAttachmentsForGT.exe - given a MO GT DSTR and a destination directory name, it will scroll through all attachments that use this GT and extract all embedded files into separate files into the given directory. The next step can be to re-attach all these documents as non-OLE attachments back, or use the extracted fies in an external system, depending on the need (this new function is available at an additioonal fee).

Of course, these software add-ons require One Attachment Manager software to be already installed and licensed in order to work, so they are only published here to illustrate the simplicity of using One Attachment Manager API's.

User's Guide and Developer's Reference document can be downloaded here.

Some of the ways this software can be used in are:

• Copy MO Attachments between different JDEdwards® EnterpriseOne® entities, i.e.: read attachments from an Employee and add the same attachments to Address Book records of the same person;
• Copy attachments from an external system, i.e. from Lotus Notes, and add them to JDEdwards® EnterpriseOne® entities;
• Copy attachments to an external system, etc.
• Bulk-print all documents per some entity, e.g.: print all Employees' Driver's Licenses, or print all documents per Customer, or Supplier, etc.

A sample architectural design diagram from one implementation: