Now we’ve made this video to inform you in an easy way what this new functionality is all about and how it can help you in your daily use of the workflow capabilities in Exact Synergy Enterprise. It will only take two minutes of your time, so enjoy!

On our product blog, you can find the article ‘Five highlights of the product update 243 of Exact Synergy Enterprise’ . A summary of those highlights:

• Request labeling;
• Time & Billing;
• Notifications on updated requests;
• Synergy mobile;
• Integration with Microsoft SQL Reporting Services.

Product management invests a lot of effort in making Synergy Enterprise as friendly and easy to use as possible, but still training is required to get to know about its raw power. To show you how Synergy Enterprise works, we film demo videos for each new product update. For example this video on Mobile:

We’ve also started publishing videos with tips how to get the best mileage out of Synergy Enterprise. Even if you are an experienced user, we hope that you find out something new about it. For example, did you know how easy it is to organize your workflow the way you see fit? Or how to personalize the cards with your accounts?

As usual, these videos are done by Exademy, Exact’s corporate center of learning. That means that the videos are short, down-to-the-point, and entertaining. Take a look at the start page for more tips.

For a full overview of all new functionality, please refer to the release notes for product update 243.

For more information on this announcement, please contact Ronald Voets at ronald.voets@exact.com

We’ve started in 242 by removing a check that Exact Synergy Enterprise can only be started by users with an IE browser. In 243, scheduled for general availabiltiy in April 2010, we’ve made several adjustments ‘under the hood’ that give us a good starting point for further enhancing Synergy Enterprise with multi-browser support. You may already notice these improvements in i.e. the request area.

Via this blog we’ll keep you updated of what the next areas will be that have multi-browser support in upcoming product updates of Exact Synergy Enterprise.

For better viewing, please click ‘full’ in the slideshow below.

Image credit for Miriam: www.rallydev.com/

In order to offer existing and new customers a more complete solution, Exact has acquired the Exact Synergy Enterprise add-on “Timesheet”, as developed by our Dutch partner Eddon Software.

By incorporating this solution into Exact Synergy Enterprise, we’ll be enriching our offering with functionality to plan, register and invoice hours for project-driven companies. Our goal is to offer the functionality as per product update 243 of Exact Synergy Enterprise (for an overview of the 2010 planning of Exact Synergy Enterprise, please see this document).

Eddon Software is an independent organization focussed on development and distribution of software add-ons on top of standard software of Exact. The team of Eddon Software consists of Exact specialists with a huge experience on Exact’s software stack. The specialists of Eddon Software are working continuously, together with partners, to help and support organizations in optimizing the use of Exact’s solutions.

In the coming period we will be giving more information about availability, pricing and functionality.

For our customers and partners, more information about the content of this update can be found in the release notes.

Real-time intelligence
The presence control allows you to make intelligent decisions about whom to communicate with and about which medium is best, because it offers you real-time information about the availability of your colleagues.

So getting back to that document or request that needs quick approval. When your document is “pending” you can now see which of the approvers is available to act. A green presence “bubble” next to the name means the resource is available. By hovering over the bubble you’ll see some information about the person, like their availability status, job title, e-mail address and scheduling information. When you click on the bubble, you can select the means by which you want to communicate and even initiate the communication from there. If you want to send an e-mail, just click on the icon and an e-mail message will be created.

You’ll benefit in the same way when you want to call an emergency meeting with your project team. Look up your project team members and see who’s available, click on their bubble, and invite them immediately using the means most appropriate for their current presence status.

How does the system know?

The presence information you see in Exact Synergy Enterprise represents a combination of a user’s availability and his/her willingness to communicate. Availability is aggregated on the Office Communication Server. To represent the user’s overall presence state, the system uses the state manually set by the user (do not disturb, away, etc.), the machine’s state [briefly inactive (temporarily not typing) or away for longer (like a lunch break)], the calendar’s state (based on the user’s Microsoft Exchange calendar) and the phone state (busy or not busy).  

It’s very important to realize that in order for the presence functionality to work for you, a few basic requirements have to be met.

• Have Microsoft Office installed
• Have Microsoft Office Communicator installed and RUNNING!
• Include your Exact Synergy Enterprise website among your list of trusted sites within your Internet Explorer settings

Finally: start to enjoy the benefits of presence functionality!

Picture credit: CodeTwo

They’ll not only benefit from the latest features right now, but also from the upcoming release of Microsoft Office 2010, which will see the light of day in the second quarter of 2010. A specific benefit for many customers will be the further integration between Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Excel 2010 for quickly analyzing information.

More information can be obtained from the Microsoft’s website.

One of Exact’s largest Globe customers in terms of number of users (>200), transactions and database size has been running live with product update 395 for a few weeks and we asked them for their feedback on the performance. Here’s the result they gave us:

• Performance improvement General ledger card: 100% (twice as fast)
• Performance of the opening balance calculation in the bank journal: 100%
• Performance improvement debtor/creditor card: 100%
• Performance improvement stock positions overview: 100%
• Performance improvement in logistics in general: 100%
• Overall performance improvement: 70%

Especially the last percentage is encouraging because it shows users notice an overall improvement of the system’s responsiveness. We’re very interested in more feedback on customer’s experiences with 395 and are gathering that continuously. If you have any experiences with 395 or feedback on this topic, feel free to comment.

Disclaimer: Any of the performance results indicated are the result for this  customer’s situation. There is no guarantee that similar results can be realized on a different database using another client, server and network configuration.