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. Synergy Office Integration, SOI in short, was introduced in 2008 and gives you the option to easily share your work created in MS Office with those for whom it is relevant. For example, with a single mouse click, you can link your documents or email messages to an account, project or opportunity, etc.. You can even create workflow the moment you save a document, so the follow-up action is directly set in motion.

For most of us, MS Outlook is the place we spend a lot of time managing our external communications. SOI brings Synergy to MS Outlook which means you have all of Synergy’s collaboration functionalities you are used to when working within your web browser without leaving Outlook.

Some benefits of using Synergy Office Integration

- All your Synergy functionalities are available within MS Outlook, which allows you to manage all your work from there.
- Synergy Office Integration is supported for Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010. SOI is available in MS Outlook, MS Word, MS Excel and MS
PowerPoint and provides you the option to create and edit Synergy documents in MS Office.
- SOI is integrated with MS Outlook in such a way, you can save your email messages with only one mouse click. The email messages saved to Synergy will be linked to the correct account and contact person. All email messages saved to Synergy are marked so you can easily recognize the email messages that have been saved to Synergy.
- Save all your important documents, Excel sheets and presentations to Synergy with only 1 mouse click. You can enrich your documents or start up workflow.
- Installation of SOI is very easy. You can directly start using SOI after the installation, no additional settings are required. At corporate level all settings can be prefilled; you can change these for yourself if you want to.

Some improvements compared to Office add-in

- Ability to work with Synergy within MS Outlook
- Usability of SOI is much better
- Support of Office 2010
- Easy installation process
- No additional settings required after installation
- Better performance
- Saving email/document with only 1 mouse click
- Installation can be done per user or per machine
- SOI is available for all Synergy users
-‘ Save as’ screen shows fields based on document type
- Possibility to create request when saving a document
- This is only a selection and more to come

What’s new in this version?

- Support of Office 2010
- Option to install SOI per machine next to the option to install per user.
- Performance improvement starting up the Office application

Developing the quotation module, we have major 2 requirements: “Easy to work with” and “Fancy templates”.  These 2 requirements are based on the assumption that:

• Account manager wants to spend as little time possible creating and maintaining their quotations.
• A quotation is the business card of your organization and can be one of the first formal contacts between your organization and your potential customer.

As the requirements show, we believe that ease of working with quotations  and the ability to make the templates the way you want  is more important than providing a full set of functionalities.

In the quotation card you can fill in most important information, like quotation number, project and opportunity information. You can enter the products and services you want to offer and define the discount you want to offer.

Based on this information, the quotation can be printed. The idea is to print it to MS Word, PDF and MS Outlook email. In the first version we expect we can deliver one of these printing options. The templates used to print a quotation are maintained in MS Word.

This blog gives you some insight in what we are working on. Because this project is still work in progress, the functionality described might deviate from what will become general available. The quotation functionality is not yet available, but we plan to have a first version available in product update 244.

SOI is used by our customers for about a year now. During this year we got a lot of positive feedback and some points of attention. We got a couple of requests to boost performance; the time to save an email or document to Synergy enterprise. In some environments this took too long and we decided to make this a focus area.

Lost couple of weeks we investigated the process of saving a document and booked some great results. In all situations we achieve a good performance boost, in some situations even up to 150%. If we compare the overall performance of Synergy Office Integration with its predecessor (Synergy office Add in), saving a document takes about 20% time less.

The performance boost is available as of product update 242. If you already run product update 242, please update to latest 242 version available.

For more information about SOI or to view a demo video, see the blog: Integration of Exact Synergy Enterprise with MS Outlook and other MS Office applications

In my previous blog I announced the introduction of Mobile Synergy.  I also promised to give you a video introduction soon. This blog contains the promised video introduction of Mobile Synergy.  Enjoy!

This video  is created by the Exademy – ‘Exact’s Corporate Center of Learning’ and is a sneak peak into how we will communicate major highlights of our product updates going forward. Stay tuned for Exact Synergy Enterprise Product Update 243 Highlights which will include this and other videos.”

It is Sunday night and Jaimie just visited some friends. On his way home his phone tells him that he has some new requests waiting for him. He checks his requests and sees that his manager approved a quotation. Good news, he can send the quotation to his prospect ‘Durian inc.’ first thing tomorrow.

It is an ongoing trend that private and business live cannot be seen as two separated parts in a day. Business and private life gets more and more integrated. One of the first things when I get out of bed is checking my phone: what’s in my inbox? Later, I check my workflow on my laptop. Also the number of emails that I send at night which are replied per instance increases almost by the week. So, something is changing.

Al the different kinds of communication make it much easier to communicate when you want, how you want and with whom you want. Today, most important communication methods are email, Mobile Phone, Social Media.

Mobile phones are already widely used today, but usage of it will continue to grow big time coming years. It is not new that mobile phones can do much more than only phone calls, but with the introduction of the iPhone the world of mobile phones changed. The mobile phone became easy to use and the number of functionalities on it seems to be endless and is still increasing every day.

Using the mobile phone as platform for a business application is powerful. Combining the functionalities available makes the options unlimited. With Mobile Synergy we start making use of this platform and its possibilities.

Mobile Synergy is build to support Jaimie doing his daily work. Jaimie is account manager, has a Nokia E72, and for him to most important information in Synergy is his workflow and everything related to his accounts. For Jaimie it is important that working on his mobile is simple and only relevant information is shown.

Today Jaimie is working with the Nokia E72, but we are convinced he will start using the iPhone or Android in the near future. Mobile Synergy works on all modern smart phones, touch and non-touch. Yes, also on the iPhone. As a guideline, modern phones are phones manufactures last 18 months.

With product update 243 we deliver the first version of Mobile Synergy, where you can expect more to come later this year. I am looking forward to your suggestions and feedback.

Curious how we helped Jaimie, watch the video introduction!



This is just an example of a business case we want to support. Of course the bill can also be a visit report that you send to visitreport@mycompany.com or a quotation you send to a customer and CC to quotation@mycompany.com. Another scenario is that information entered on a website is send to a mailbox info@mycompany.com. All email messages here result in request for the sales inside department.

Hopefully these examples give you an idea of the solution we want to offer. With this solution you can define action per email address: created request X and/or document type Y for every incoming email. The request and/or document is email address specific, so an email received at info@mycompany.com can result in an ‘Information request’ where an email received at expenseclaim@mycompany.com can result in an ‘Expense claim request’ with the bill linked to it.

Before we offer this functionality to all our customers, we want to start with a small group of customers to work with it. Together with this group we can evaluate the solution.

Are you interested in joining this small group of customers, please let me know and send me an email: martin.ortgiess@exactsoftware.com.

If you have any questions are feedback on this article, please leave a comment and share your thoughts with us!

Photo credit: ydhsu

Outlook is one of the main gateways to share information. The usage of email is easy and fast, although it also has some important downsides, which you are probably aware of. One of the downsides is that distribution of one email results in multiple email messages in a lot of local databases (Outlook folders). It is unclear who has and does not have the information available and when there is an update, not everybody might be aware. This is why an application like Synergy Enterprise is so important. Information is only stored once, and you can easily see who can see it. When a change is made, this is directly visible to everybody it concerns.

With Synergy Office Integration we have succeeded to have best of both worlds. Because you are so used to the MS Outlook interface, we made Synergy Enterprise available there. This means that all functionalities you know from Synergy, can now be accessed via MS Outlook.

We have introduced the Synergy toolbar in MS Outlook, which provides you exactly what you need: the options available here follow the user preferences. This means that the Synergy Enterprise options in MS Outlook are the same as the options you have using Internet Explorer.

Because you will not stop using your email, we also looked at how we could achieve a tighter integration between your emails and Synergy Enterprise. And looking to the positive feedback we received so far, I think we succeeded. We have introduced the ‘save’ button, which will give you the option to save your incoming and outgoing email to Synergy Enterprise with only 1 mouse click. If the email address is recognized, it will automatically be linked to the right contact person in Synergy Enterprise.

The email message in Outlook will be tagged, so you can easily see which emails are saved to Synergy Enterprise.

When you want to add more information to the email message, when saving it to Synergy Enterprise, you can select the ‘save as’ button to save the email message. Now you can add additional information and also create a request instantly.

Conclusion: no need to leave Outlook when you work with Synergy Enterprise. With Synergy Office Integration all your Synergy functionalities are available in MS Outlook. Next to MS Outlook we also offer a tight integration with MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint and MS FrontPage.

Photo credit: Shareski

OCS (Office Communications Server) is a Unified Communications (UC) platform and helps you to make intelligent decision about how and whom to contact. Exact Synergy Enterprise is the central work environment within an organization, and enabling presence strengthens this position.

Enabling OCS presence within Exact Synergy Enterprise, can limit delays in your day to day work. Because you can easily see who is available and how you can reach him. Communication becomes much faster and will enhance collaboration.

To give you an impression on what it will look like, we offer you this preview. This preview briefly shows you what we want to offer our customers. This functionality is expected to be available Q4 2009.

Photo credit: Mugley

You might recognize OCS presence as the icon in Windows Messenger showing whether a person is available or not, like:  Martin Ortgiess.

From here, you can start up a communication via instant message, call, LiveMeeting or other methods based on the presence of that person. Starting a conversation is only one click away:

Communication methods OCS presence

Note that the communication methods available are dependent of the OCS implementation.

Presence within Synergy Enterprise is not new. This functionality is available since the beginning of the product. Every Synergy Enterprise user will recognize this icon. It shows how long ago the user has logged into Synergy Enterprise.

Where OCS presence is based on information from Microsoft  Exchange Server, usage of keyboard and other devices, the current Exact Synergy presence is based only on the last action of a user in Exact Synergy Enterprise. Where OCS presence has multiple statuses of presence, current presence is logged in not longer than hour ago, or logged in longer than hour ago.

OCS statuses of presence

Enabling OCS presence within Synergy Enterprise is a setting. Activating this setting will directly show OCS presence of users within Synergy Enterprise. OCS presence will not only be available on those places where the monitor was shown, but also in other screens like the resource card and in the requests. By enabling OCS presence, the old ‘monitor’ will not be available anymore.

Via this post I hope to get more feedback on especially this part. Should the current presence indicator (presented by monitor) remain available when OCS presence is activated? With OCS presence much more functionality is offered. The field on the resource card, showing the last action of the user remains available.