Synergy Office Integration vs. Synergy Office add-in
Posted on 08. Dec, 2010 by Martin Ortgiess in Exact Synergy
- What are the differences?
- Which should you use?
- What Office versions are supported?
- How much longer will Office Add-in be supported
Microsoft Office is what most people are used to using for sending email, making appointments, creating documents, presentations etc. It works well for these tasks and everybody knows how to use it. Linking Exact’s collaboration tool Synergy with the Microsoft Office applications was a logical progression.
Since the introduction of Synergy we offered the “Office add-in” (OAI) for a tight integration with Microsoft Office. In 2008 we introduced a new product to integrate Microsoft Office with Synergy: Synergy Office Integration (SOI). With the introduction of SOI we offered our users a better user experience using latest technologies.
Where we continue to improve SOI, OAI is in maintenance mode since the introduction of SOI and is supported up to Office 2007.
SOI is the successor of OAI, but functionality is not copied over 1-on-1. We changed functionality a bit to improve user experience. In some cases this means we cut of functionality that is hardly used. What was the last time you used the ‘Link’ option to paste a Synergy URL in a Word document?
But we also added some new functionality, like the option to start a request the moment of saving a document or email.
If you are really interested in some more details, the list below shows the advantages of using SOI against the Office Add-in.
| Lifecycle | SOI is introduced 2008 and we continue to improve. OAI is introduces over 10 years ago. It is in maintenance mode since 2008 and will not be supported as of MS Office 2010. |
| Supported Office versions | SOI is supported for Office 2007 and Office 2010. OAI is supported up to Office 2007 |
| Synergy users | SOI is available for all Synergy users. OAI is available for CRM user and professional user |
| Outlook ribbon. | Access the Synergy environment within Outlook. In Outlook there is a ribbon showing the same functions you have in Synergy in your web browser. The menu in Outlook is based on the preferences defined in Synergy. |
| ‘Save’ functionality to save an email or document | Email or document can be saved with one mouse click. The document is saved based on the user settings |
| ‘Save as’ functionality to save an email or document |
|
| Extra save functionality for email |
|
| Quotation | The quotation module in Synergy is integrated with SOI. Quotations (templates) are created in MS Word using SOI. The quotation module cannot be used together with OAI. |
| Accounts Import Wizard | Import the account information in your Excel sheet with the Accounts Import Wizard |
| Mail merge |
|
| Editing attachments | User has the option to edit attachments in MS Office |
| View your document saved in Synergy | From your email or document, you can directly open the Synergy document which was created |
| Remember me | User can select to remember username and password, so there is no need to log-in when using SOI |
| Edit a Synergy document in MS Word, MS Excel or MS PowerPoint and update original document in Synergy | Synergy documents can be edited in MS Word, MS Excel and MS PowerPoint. Editing and saving back to the original document in Synergy is possible as long as the document is not closed in the Office application. Reopening the document in Office will not give you the option to update the original document in Synergy. It does give you the option to create a new document.In OAI document can be maintained ‘offline’, because the Synergy document ID was stored in the Office document. We choose not to support this anymore, because of some important disadvantages, like when you copy a MS Word document, the same document ID is now stored in 2 documents |
| User Settings | The number of settings is strongly reduced. The only settings left is to define the default document type to use for saving:
Besides the document type, user can also select the document fields which should be prefilled. In OAI user could select to automatically save email, prompt a message or manually save it. In SOI this setting is not available anymore and documents are saved manually |
| Corporate settings | At corporate level, all settings can be predefined. When a user installs SOI he can directly start without defining any settings. |
| Multiple Synergy environments | In SOI, the Synergy environment is defined during the installation. This environment cannot be changed and others environments cannot be added |
| Installation | The installation can be done for ‘single user’ or ‘per machine’. Installation is done via MSI file |
Photo credits: Beech boy
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43 Responses to “Synergy Office Integration vs. Synergy Office add-in”
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Synergy User
20. Aug, 2010
Hi Martin
Although I like SOI I do miss the automatic save feature that is in the Synergy Office AddIn. If this feature was incorporated in SOI it would be a great addition
Anthony
21. Aug, 2010
Synergy User (Comment above) is correct, the Auto & Semi Auto Save functions are very popular with customers, as is the abiliuty to put people on a Always / Deny List.
Arno
23. Aug, 2010
I think the time that you have to work with client side solutions is over. You should integrate email into Synergy and not Synergy into Outlook….
Whe have so many troubles with the outlook add in, installing, admin-rights, multiple users on 1 terminal server, automatic installing on logon, etc etc. And then, with the webmail client, you cannot do a thing…
And the errors we have to deal with, users cannot
trust on it and that’s a pity.
When you build the solution IN Synergy you can be reliable, easy and do your work @ 1 spot!
And for the real addicted outlook users, maybe it is good to combine
Rob
23. Aug, 2010
Indeed, just for this feature, I am still using OAI as an addition to SOI…
Aimee
23. Aug, 2010
I think SOI rocks. But I have to say I did use the ‘link’ funcitonality in OAI a lot and miss that. It’s especially nice for users with little technical knowledge. You can still create pre-filled links to documents and requests but you have to serach out the correct syntax etc. But overall, I find SOI a huge improvement on OAI and I really like working with it.
Martin Ortgiess
24. Aug, 2010
Hi all,
Thanks for your feedback.
Since the introduction of SOI 2 years ago, i got the feedback of automatically saving of email ones. Reading your feedback, I understand there is a bigger demand for it. Can you share with us why you automatic saving of email is that important to you and do you really save ALL your emails to Synergy?
@Arno: I have been at your company couple of times during my consultancy period. The version of Synergy you work with does not support SOI. I would be glad to drop you a visit and show you in real life how SOI works.
Arno
24. Aug, 2010
Hi Martin,
Thank you for your reply. I invite you to come over, it is maybe interesting to you how we work with Synergy nowadays. And I am interested in how you can convince me with the big differences between SOI en OAI. The biggest problem we have is to manage the little app and the errors on clients…
Contact me!
Leo van der Schee
26. Aug, 2010
Hi Martin,
I also miss the save option in SOI. I don’t use the automatic version, but the option that with every send e-mail the system ask me whether I want to save it or not (semi automatic). This is a strong functionality bccause you can save the incoming mail and the outgoing mail directly in one action under the relation- and contacperson card . Manualy would main al least two or three more actions for me. Do you really go to your send items in Outlook and saves an email manually ? This is certainly not user friendly. What is the reason that Exact skipped this functionality?
Leo
Martin Ortgiess
27. Aug, 2010
Hi Leo,
One of the improvements we made in SOI is that you can select to save your outgoing email. When you are typing your email, the save button is already available. When you will do the actual sending of the email, the email will be saved to Synergy. No need to go to your send items
Martin Ortgiess
27. Aug, 2010
Arno,
see you next week!
Vincent Nooren
01. Sep, 2010
Hi Martin,
I work now two weeks with SOI and i really like it, but you know what i miss. I miss PDF integration. . I have a lot of pdf documents which i want to save directly to ESE.
If you want to improve it, make the install wizard more helpful with better helpfiles when things are going wrong. It took me a while before i had it working nicely
Edgar Wieringa
03. Sep, 2010
@Vincent:
Hi Vincent,
Should you have a lot of PDF files just standing in a directory, maybe the bulk upload can help you: http://blogs.exact.com/products/2010/04/easily-upload-a-set-of-files/.
Hope this helps you for some of your scenarios,
Edgar
Vincent Nooren
12. Sep, 2010
@Edgar thanks for the tip but my remark was too enthusiastic. We scan a lot of personalized documents. It would be nice if there was a kind of plugin in the adobe, to save it right away to synergy. The pdf i refer to are also a lot of images, who belongs to different employees. We have like 800 people in synergy, of who we keep documents, that can be average 5- 10 documents per person, Average 4 of them are pdfs. The rest will be word docx and therefore i have of course SOI.
Martin Ortgiess
16. Sep, 2010
Hi Vincent,
You say you scan personalized document. Ofcourse dependent of your scanner, you can scan the document and have this saved in your mailbox.
If your scanner supports this, you can save this PDF files via SOI in Outlook.
Could this be an option for you?
Martin Ortgiess
17. Sep, 2010
Today we made some new functionality available in product update 243:
- Office 2010 is supported
- Installation per machine is available, next to installation per user
Elod
05. Jan, 2011
Does the Synergy Office Integration support 64 bit OS? I have successfully installed the add-ins on all 32 bit OS clients’ computers but failed on Windows 7 64 bit OS.
Thanks in advance.
Martin Ortgiess
05. Jan, 2011
Office Integration works on a 64 Operating system. It will not work on a 64 bit Office version. I have a W7 64 bit machine with Office 2010 32 bit and works perfect!
Elod
05. Jan, 2011
Thank you for your prompt reply. Then I will give a try with Office 2010 32-bit version.
Elod
05. Jan, 2011
Martin,
I’m not sure this is the right place reporting technical issues, but I still have this one. My colleague is using Win7 64-bit with Office 2007 (x86) and the office integration fails. I have error log information referring to a dll which has a different computed hash than specified in manifest.
Any clue where should I turn to with my problem?
Thanks.
Martin Ortgiess
05. Jan, 2011
Hi,
well, i don’t have the answer on that question for you. Best thing is to contact Exact support department. One thing i can think about is this: When you do a per machine installation, you need to have a specific patch Office 2007 to get it working. Per user installation should be fine in all Office 2007 versions. Please contact our support department for the details on this.
Jan de Vries
28. Jan, 2011
We had no other choice than to migrate from Office 2003 to Office 2010 because of support of invoegtoepassingen by the vendors of our calculatiesoftware. Once we had installed Office 2010 I found out that OAI is not supported by Exact for Office 2010. Therefore we started installation of SOI. Once I had SOI installed I could not find the field “include header” from OAI in SOI. Therefore our e-mail is stored without header and I can not print the original e-mail on paper. Is that true ? Or am I missing something ? Is it not possible to include the original e-mail header in a document ? Where is the field “include header” in SOI ?
Jan de Vries
Martin Ortgiess
28. Jan, 2011
Hi Jan,
good to hear you’re on Office 2010. I am working with it for over a year and think is much better than previous Office versions.
As for the email header, this is by default saved to Synergy. Saving an email, will save the email body and it’s attachments. The email header is saved in a section on top of the document and shows exactly the same as in the email itself. I will send you an example of it. If this does not happen on your side, please contact the support department.
Martin Ortgiess
28. Jan, 2011
Question to all of you: when you save an email to Synergy, using SOI, the email header is always saved. When you want to print the saved email from Synergy, the email header is not printed, only the email content. How important is it for you that the email header is printed as well?
Dave.kickken
28. Jan, 2011
I agree with Jan. There is noway in SOI to reproduce the original e-mail on paper. So you cannot use it as a legal document.
Why not save the *.msg file as an attachment.
It makes it also possible to directly create a reply email
Bert Zweers
02. Feb, 2011
Printing mail…
As far as I am concerned, printing an email is a waste of paper. Attachments yes, although not very often.
I know a lot of people who do however print their email, but I think most of them print it straight away and not later on. Then they print it out of Outlook and not from Synergy.
Dave’s suggestion about replying from Synergy, would be a great added functionality however.
Menno Verbon
05. Feb, 2011
I’m been working with the SOI for more then 1 year and it has improved a lot, but still needs a lot of work.
In my opinion performance is still a problem. Way to slow. I’m missing the feedback in Excel and Word when a document is saved. Now you have to guess.
Also the stability is not 100%. At least once a day i have to “kill” outlook because the SOI crashes. Some mail are impossible to save because SOI fails over and over again on it. Why? I do not know.
Tejo van de Bor
28. Feb, 2011
SOI is working great, but most of our customers are still on e-Synergy Classic.
So we build our own addin platform for extended functionality and customer solutions on Exact e-Synergy or Exact Synergy Enterprise .
Feel free to check out our Itenz+ DOCUMENT addin for Microsoft Office 2007/2010 or visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHXmZaQ9Hg8 for a demonstration. Itenz+ MAIL will be there soon.
Synergy User
28. Feb, 2011
SOI is working great for SOME customers! In a Citrix environment its a different story….
If anyone has been able to use SOI in a citrix or TS environment I would happy to hear how they achieved this..
Synergy User
28. Feb, 2011
Hi Tejo
Is this solution only available to the dutch market?
Martin Ortgiess
28. Feb, 2011
SOI in a Citrix environment had some troubles which are solved in the last couple of months. we have several customers running SOI in a citrix environment now.
SOI User
09. Mar, 2011
Martin,
Is there any news on the automatic save option? This would be extremely important for us.
I liked how that worked in OAI, but it would even be better if you can have more options (e.g. automatically save emails from relationship type Client, Prospect and Lead).
Another question: when you save an email, Synergy show the date it was edited/created in Synergy. This date and time is often differen to the actual date/time of receiving or sending the email (especially without automatic save option). Is it also possible in the documents overview to show the actual time and date it was received/sent ?
Martin Ortgiess
09. Mar, 2011
Dear SOI user,
at this moment there are no plans to introduce to option to automatically save email messages out of the box. Though with the introduction on the Exact event managerit should be (almost) possible to define your own rules when it comes to saving email. The Exact event manager can read your Exchange server and based on that trigger actions in Synergy, like save the email, create requests etc. I’ll ask my colleague to share more on that in this blog. You can also view his blogs in the section ‘Exact event manager’
matthewbather
09. Mar, 2011
The release of Exact Event Manager 1.6 will provide for the ability to monitor an Exchange Server and take defined emails and upload them into Synergy as a document (attachment) automatically, based on the Event Properties and schedules.
Synergy User
10. Mar, 2011
@Matthew & Martin
Surely buying additional software to overcome a fundimental shortcoming in SOI is not the answer? Many Synergy user are ASP and if Exact want to convert them to Enterprise then there it shouldn’t be at the cost of important functionality. This is another example of bridging the gap buy buying costly middleware to resolve a development issue…….
The way the OAI works with the ability to manage or automatically upload emails is something I am surprised the SOI cannot do… you have a good product with Synergy Enterprise but it can be a lot better with this.
Martin Ortgiess
10. Mar, 2011
Synergy user,
When designing Synergy Office Integration, there was a reason for not bringing this functionality: feedback from market showed is was hardly used. Office add-in offered an automatic and semi-automatic function for uploading email. I dont know anybody using the automatic version. 3 persons in this blog commented on this functionality sofar.
I would like to get in contact with those who think we should introduce the (semi) automatic save function for email messages. I am open to take a look at the possibilities, but need to have clear insight in the requirements. please contact me at martin.ortgiess(at)exact.com.
Thanks!
Edwin Adams
24. Mar, 2011
What happend to the SAVE AS functionality if multiple external email adresses are selected?
In the Office Add-in, you were able to create only one single document using SAVE AS instead of SAVE.
In SOI, it will create a new document for each recipient. So the same mail (and attachments) is stored multiple times, only to link it to the contact, regardless SAVE or SAVE AS.
By the way, the best solution to fix this issue is to implement a 1:n relation between documents and contacts. Just like Exchange is doing.
Robert Klein
28. Apr, 2011
I have a Macola customer that is not a Synergy customer, but Auto Saving emails is critical. They are interested in Synergy Enterprise, moving to Office 2010, therefore SOI is there best (only) option to save emails w attachments. If they upgrade their current CRM, all emails would be auto saved, and you can manually delete those if needed. The President of the company would rather have every email saved, then relying on the user to manually save them, since some users are not CRM users and are Outlook centric!
Martin Ortgiess
13. May, 2011
Hi Robert,
In a earlier reply Matthew wrote:
“The release of Exact Event Manager 1.6 will provide for the ability to monitor an Exchange Server and take defined emails and upload them into Synergy as a document (attachment) automatically, based on the Event Properties and schedules.”
Could that be an option for this customer?
Regards, Martin
Gary@VCD
17. Nov, 2011
Has anyone tried to print an e-mail from Oulook AFTER it has been saved to Synergy? Have you seen the amount of Synergy meta-data that is printed? Was this part of the functional requirements?
Stephan ten Kate
22. Nov, 2011
We just migrated from Synergy ASP to Synergy Enterprise, and we’re missing the automatically email save functionality in Outlook 2010 with the SOI.
Feel free to contact me if you want some insides about this.
Best Regards,
Stephan ten Kate
Martin Ortgiess
22. Nov, 2011
Hi Stephan,
Synergy Office Integration has been hugely expanded in product update 248, which will be general available as of january 2012. One of the features there is automatically saving of email to Synegry, BUT much better then Office add-in. Per Outlook folder you can define if the email coming into this folder should be automatically uploaded to Synergy. per folder you can define for example the document type, account, project, etc, etc.. it should use to save the email to synergy.
You can drag and drop email in a folder or have this done by Outlook rules. Does this answer your needs?
David
24. Dec, 2011
We have an XP machine with Outlook 2007.
The Exact Synergy Enterprise toolbar shows in Excel and Word -> but not in Outlook.
Is there something i can double check?
Cédric
27. Dec, 2011
David,
You may find it in Outlook in the disabled items.
Enable SOI again, then if necessary activate SOI in the COM complements,