Saving Time: Helping customers instead of finding documents!

Posted on 12. Oct, 2010 by Robin den Buurman in Exact Synergy

As an Exact Synergy Enterprise user you probably know you have a powerful Document Management System (DMS) available to you. On the other hand you might not realize this since it is so obvious that you take it for granted.

A lot of our daily processes require Documents, Presentations, Microsoft Excel sheets, Adobe PDF’s and all sorts of other scanned documents. Due to the integration of the Exact Synergy Enterprise Document Management System with workflow, HRM, CRM and the other modules within Exact Synergy Enterprise the DMS functionality might be overlooked but it’s part of the core system functionality. Let me take you on a short track on the Document Management System functionality:

Structured & Save centralized document storage

Predefined and configurable document types and templates allow you to structure your company’s documents and assign properties to them such as items and accounts. By storing them in the Exact Synergy Enterprise DMS you have them centralized and stored safely to be accessed from anywhere on the world by simply using a web browser.

Audit trail

Exact Synergy Enterprise can log all actions and changes that involved the document, generating an automatic audit trail and readers statistics.

Security

All documents stored are set with security levels, so that only those who have effective rights to see or to edit those documents can do so. All these rights can be set easily to each employee according to their roles in the organization.

Collaboration

Since the DMS and Workflow system are integrated you can accompany documents with your processes. The other actors in a workflow process immediately have the required documentation which allows them to take appropriate action. Also the Check-in and Check-out and Versioning system improve collaboration by maintaining different versions of the document or to indicate an colleague is currently busy with the document. We also support RSS feeds, check out this video.

Finding what you need

With Exact Synergy Enterprise there are multiple possibilities to differentiate documents and make them easier to find. Off course any document can contain extra properties and metadata that may identify a document or author. The full text search engine indexes documents on its contents. Synonym search allows the user to use different word with the same meaning such as “proposal” and “Quotation”. “Did you mean…” system is in place to detect misspellings during the search operation. And a rating system based on referral and occurrences allows Exact Synergy Enterprise to determine the relevancy of a document. On top of this all a tag system allows the user to attach specific keywords to documents. All of these systems can be used to find the document you are looking for.

Office integration

With the Synergy Office Integration you can easily create and edit your documents in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. In Microsoft Outlook you can save your incoming and outgoing emails.

See related articles on the Exact Synergy Office Integration here and here

Interfacing

Using the Exact Connectivity Framework (WCF) Services you can easily interface with the Exact Synergy Enterprise Document Management System. Searching, storing, retrieving documents from and to the DMS by other applications can be realized this way.

To close… some stats from our live environment

At Exact we use Exact Synergy Enterprise for all our employees, customers and partners. 2000+ people are working on a daily basis with the document management system. Out of curiosity I wanted to get some statistics out of our own environment, you will find them below:

Format / Name	*Amount*
HTM	32%
Adobe	20%
Images	16%
MS WORD	12%
MS Excel	8%
XML	2%
ZIP	1%
Database	>1 TB
# Documents	10 Million+
Most Read	Globe Release Notes Current Release with approx. 600.000 hits since Jan 1^st.

Feedback is highly appreciated!

Photo Source: Doug Kanter for The New York Times

11 Responses to “Saving Time: Helping customers instead of finding documents!”

Robert Klein

21. Oct, 2010

with the Adobe % being as high as it is, you would think we could build an internal case to build an integration to Adobe, it has been asked before from Synergy users in North America!

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Kenneth Sewell

21. Oct, 2010

We would definitely use a Adobe addin to type and sign documents. Currently, we have to download adobe pdfs, edit them with standard or professional and then re upload.

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Ann Roos Hayner

22. Oct, 2010

I agree with Robert and Ken. It’s past time we had an Adobe Add-in. It has become the de-facto standard for most companies.

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Robin den Buurman

22. Oct, 2010

Hi All,
Thanks for the feedback. I recall a discussion with some of you about a year ago on LinkedIn on this subject. I will see if the situation has changed since than and will get back on this.

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Robin den Buurman

26. Oct, 2010

Meantime, maybe we can elaborate a bit on how we would use such an feature, I mean I can imagine that one would receive a PDF by email and in that case I would be able to easily upload it in Synergy using the Exact Synergy Office Integration. Looking the other way around, when the PDF is in Synergy I can press download button and its opened in Adobe. How would such a feature look like?

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Scott Leete

27. Oct, 2010

Robin: I scan a document into Adobe Acrobat. From there, I want to press the “save” button as I would from SOI in Word or Outlook. I should also have the option to create a request during the save procedure, linking the new document as I can in Outlook.

What about giving the abilty to right mouse click on a document in Windows Explorer and save directly to Synergy. (OK, I know that is not Adobe, but still nice).

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Kenneth Sewell

27. Oct, 2010

Uploading new pdf documents to synergy inside adobe would be great, but I would really like to see the ability to edit pdf docs too. Of course you couldn’t edit a pdf with the free reader, but all of our users have adobe standard or professional. We would like to be able to scan in documents as PDFs, attach them to a workflow and when the user gets the PDF in the workflow be able to open the PDF, use the typewriter function, add a stamp or digitialy sign and then resave back into synergy like you can with a word or excel doc. Currently, we have to download the document, edit and then reupload.

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Robin den Buurman

02. Nov, 2010

To get an idea about the usage I started a poll:
http://polls.linkedin.com/p/108704/djxsb

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Robin den Buurman

09. Nov, 2010

Hi all,
The linkedin poll shows about 5% of Acrobat users. Due to the limited responses (35) it does not say a lot but it does gives us a view on how PDF is used (Printer driver using is surprising to me because in my experience it never seems to work as you would expect). I discussed a possible Adobe Acrobat (and/or Reader) plugin internally but currently we feel there are just to view customers that will benefit from it. Meaning the priority is currently too low to be scheduled for development.

I am willing to share my knowlegde and information with anyone that wants to take a shot at this (software development partner with C++?).

Still its good to keep up these discussions although not all will end in a positive decision. Thanks all!

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Jasper de Lange

26. Apr, 2011

I’ve read the discussion above with interest. Since a big part of our document flow consists of hardcopy (signed) documents being scanned and uploaded into Synergy we would really appreciate such a Adobe Acrobat plugin. We are facing the same (time consuming) workaround of downloading, opening and storing back.

Another problem we face is we regularly get emails with a lot of different documents in one email. It is a lot of work to separately add these documents to synergy (with the different links to be made and all). It is even harder when we receive a scan in one PDF document containing documents that have to be stored separately in Synergy.

At first we thought a Acrobat plugin would be really nice, but as your poll shows, a lot of people use the Adobe printer service. We use it as well, since we don’t face any problems with it. I was thinking that maybe the development of a Synergy printer service would be a nice idea. There would be no limitation of automatically insert a document into Synergy. The only possible drawback would be that files wouldn’t be editable anymore once they’re printed.

For us such a printer would be a nice solution for the PDF files containing multiple documents as mentioned above.

We think that a lot of companies using Synergy would benefit from the advantages of being able to upload any document into Synergy as quickly as with a print-job.

I would like to hear your thoughts about this matter.

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17. Feb, 2012

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