For this product update we also did many, many, many legal changes to help you fulfilling your legal requirements. A few examples are:

• Support of Italian INTRASTAT return,
• Extended SEPA to Austrian legislation,
• Added additional Bank Formats.

We further extended the method Work-In-Progress Cost and Revenue; started to support Microsoft Office 2010 32-bit & Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and renamed Pick-IT into Warehouse Management System (E-WMS) to reflect its growing functionality and full integration into Exact Globe as a standard module.

Besides those bigger changes we also looked into the feedback you shared with us and based on your feedback we also made it possible to:

• Store more layouts in PDF format,
• Run the MRP cleanup tool also for production orders and stock allocations,
• Process unauthorized Incoming Invoice Register (IIR) entries when closing a period,
• Export ‘Flow of Goods report’ to Microsoft Excel.

The functionalities mentioned in this blog are just a few of all the improvements we did in product update 398. Check the product update news page for the high lights and video’s and check the release notes for an overview of all the improvements and their details.

Most of the SDK development tools are automatically available when installing Exact Globe or Exact Synergy Enterprise. Having the correct modules in the license will activate the SDK for the developers to develop their solutions on top of our products.

To support our development partners the best, we are constantly looking how to improve the SDK. Examples we currently did, or are working on, are:

1. Constantly improvements and extension on SDK functionalities,
2. Extended the SDK training for Exact Synergy Enterprise with a repository section,
3. Setup development guidelines for solutions on Exact Synergy Enterprise,
4. Updated the product certification process,
5. And we recently started to document the most important controls of Exact Synergy Enterprise.

For the development of the solutions we offer our development partners online documentation about the SDK development tools. This documentation is presented on our portal and can only be accessed by our customers, partners and employees. There are two start pages:

• SDK Exact Synergy Enterprise – Customer/ Partner/ Employee
• SDK Exact Globe – Customer/ Partner/ Employee

We now addressed the SDK documentation as the next step to improve. We already made a start with the documentation of the controls but that’s not the only improvement we would like to make.

I would like to invite you, our development partners, to comment on this blog what you really miss or what you would see improved about the SDK documentation. Based on your feedback I will compile a list of improvements that would make your life easier. In a new blog post I will share this list with you and where we will focus on for the coming period.

I’m looking forward to receive your input.

Those examples describe a connection with a specific application where we, as Exact, have established the connection ourselves. Here we are fully in control to define the connection. But other organizations also want to exchange information between their applications and our applications. They want to use the connection the same way as we do in our applications to:

1. Present information from other applications
2. Exchange data to help their users to improve their productivity

In our applications we had basically two main possibilities to establish a connection to exchange information. Those two possibilities are:

1. XML; With XML, Exact and other organizations have the possibility to exchange data via an XML file.
2. SDK; With the Software Development Kit, certified solution partners can develop their own solution for exchanging data, real-time.

Those two possibilities are very useful to exchange information but are not the solution to establish easy, standard connections between Exact’s applications and other applications. The main reason is that those possibilities are not standardized and /or do not work real-time.

To come to the situation that we can easily connect with other applications we have made several steps. We have built a layer in Exact Globe and Exact Synergy Enterprise which we call the connectivity layer. This layer gives the possibility to exchange data, real-time in a standardized format based on a request – reply structure. Via this layer, entities, which are different types of data such as ‘accounts’ and ‘resources’, can be exchanged. At this moment 6 entities are supported for Exact Globe and 20 entities for Exact Synergy Enterprise and we are extending this number with every new product update.

The beauty of this connectivity layer is that the same structure is used for both applications. So we basically get one way of connecting for both Exact Globe and Exact Synergy Enterprise. The difference is only that Exact Globe supports the entities on component level and that Exact Synergy Enterprise supports the entities on component level as well as through web services.

I think that with this connectivity layer we make connecting with Exact Globe and Exact Synergy Enterprise much easier. Ok, it’s still something that is only to be used by developers, but it makes their lives much easier.

Although we know that this is a good step, we also know that establishing connectivity between two applications can be made  even easier than this. To realize this, we have signed a strategic partnership with Pervasive to use their Data Integrator as a preferred middleware solution to establish the connection. More about this partnership in my next blog post.

Please share via a comment to this article your opinion about you vision on connectivity and please let me know if you see possibilities to improve it even further. Do not hesitate to share your great ideas!

Photo credit: Visulogik