If you are interested in the contents of these product updates, and we hope you do, please keep an eye on this blog. Here we will share our ideas, experiences and news about all planned new and improved functionality.

And what is even more important: we hope that you are also willing to share your opinions and suggestions with us. In the end, you will be working with our solutions and therefore it is extremely important for us that we know exactly what you need. This blog is one of the channels we use to gather your input, so please make yourself heard.

Please keep in mind that this is a planning that might be subject to change.

Photo credit: doug88888

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.

Last week I saw another example of this, it may look simple but I belief it is a small example of a bigger truth. In our product there are a set of searchboxes on the left -hand side to quickly jump to, for instance, an item code. Let’s say you are looking for more information on the item SYN0000 (it is one of the products you sell). You got the code in an e-mail from a colleague and you want to look it up in Exact Synergy Enterprise. So double click it, please try.

If you do this in Windows it will help (??) you by also selecting the trailing space behind it. Our product used to search for the item code including that space, hence it found nothing. So it was decided (as a reaction to customer feedback) to support you by ignoring that space. Now my actual story starts, it is not about how to solve this problem best, but about what happened after the change (cutting off the space at the end).

During one of our feedback rounds with customer stakeholders it was found out that an undocumented feature of our product now was broken. The search allowed you to enter only a space (‘ ‘) and if you would search, then you would get all items in result. By removing the space, as was requested earlier, it searched for nothing now. So a report was entered to fix this. Without any reason why: just fix it. It was first rejected. I can partly understand why: who would like to search for everything? That is not ‘searching’ but just ‘data browsing’ for which we have nice overviews with much more convient options. Which customer would like to walk-through all item data in a search? It was more work to re-introduce this and it looked like there were better alternatives; so the report was rejected.

Only then the context came in, as quite some customers seemed to have discovered this feature to easily see everything, and were quite content with it. People used it for instance to walk-through the documents created during that day within the company. So, to stay informed about all the work their colleagues were doing, searching in this way helping them to be informed and serve their customers better. With the context it was crystal clear this needed to be supported.

Adding context has two great benefits: it creates clarity and helps people to understand the real issue. And secondly and as least as important: we learn more about the actual usage of software. And that is essential to make people benefit from it even more.

Photo credit: emagic

Colleagues and customers involved come from all parts of the organization and from all over the globe. Customer Support in China, pre-sales from the US and consultant from The Netherlands. Viewing it from these different angles is important and sometimes leads to surprises. For example: we have adjusted our search functionality for Exact Synergy Enterprise so that it now can find <Jiří> just by typing <Jiri>. So, the search now also excludes the diacritics. We used the word ‘transliteration’ for this in our release documentation. We realized that it had a broader meaning, but we thought we scoped it clearly in the other parts of the documentation. The question from China however was: can I now find  <收件人> just by typing <shoujianren>? Indeed Google does have this functionality, but this is a step we have not yet made. ‘Searching=Finding’ will however keep on having our focus.

Photo credit: Desirée Delgado