Mmm, are you lost? Do you understand what this is about? Maybe you do, but let me explain how we and our customers benefit from Scrum. The power of Scrum is continuously focus on quick delivery of maximized business value.
Through early feedback we can react faster so quality, understandability and predictability of software development can improve. This will give us an agile development process in which we can deliver better products in a shorter time frame.

How?
Scrum contains sets of practices and predefined roles. The main roles in Scrum are:

1. the “Scrum Master”, the facilitator. A key part of the Scrum Master’s role is to protect the team and keep them focused on the tasks in hand.
2. the “Product Owner”, who represents the voice of the customer. He/she ensures that the Scrum Team works on the “right things” from a business perspective.
3. the “Team” has the responsibility to deliver the product. A team is made up of 5–9 people with cross-functional skills who do the actual work (design, develop, test, technical communication, etc.).

During each “sprint”, in Exact a two-week period, the team creates a shippable product enhancement (for example, working and tested software). The set of features that go into a sprint come from the product “backlog”, which is a prioritized set of high level requirements of work to be done. Which backlog items go into the sprint is determined during the sprint planning meeting. During this meeting, the Product Owner informs the team of the items in the product backlog that he or she wants completed. The team then determines how much of this they can commit to complete during the next sprint. During a sprint, no one is allowed to change the sprint backlog, which means that the requirements are frozen for that sprint. After a sprint is completed, the team demonstrates how to use the software.

Benefits!
An important advantage of the Scrum approach is that planning is a continuous repetitive activity. Scrum does not try to predict the future at the start of a project, but aims at continuously improving the estimates based on experience. Each sprint the productivity of the team is determined and this knowledge is used to make a more accurate estimate for the next sprint. Furthermore estimating tasks are being performed by the team itself, and the whole team is doing it. This has two major advantages. First, the estimate are based on the knowledge and vision of all team members and therefore more realistic. Second, everyone is committed to the estimate, because everyone must agree on an estimate during planning. Another important advantage of Scrum is it always serves the business. A Scrum team is always working for the actual most important business goals, and the business may if necessary adjust quickly. And because a Scrum project should yield operating software on a regular basis, and the product owner determines what functionality should be delivered, it is not possible to pass difficult problems to the back. Finally, the Scrum approach has some financial benefits. With Scrum key functionality can be taken in production as soon as possible. The return on investment is higher, and the financial impact of any delay is smaller.

Please share your experience and ideas via a comment to this article  and use the ‘share and enjoy’ buttons!

Our corporate center of learning, Exademy, has released a series of excellent highlight videos about the latest update of Exact Globe.

Well, this is not that much of a news, since Exademy prepares such videos for every single product update for both Synergy Enterprise and Globe, and they have always been of notable quality.

However, there are two major differences this time.

First, Exademy filmed the new videos with our customers in mind and made them available to everyone. If you have already read about Globe product update 397, do watch the videos, because they are good and they tell a lot of interesting details. Since the videos are in now public domain, we encourage you to share them with customers, prospects and anyone else who is interested.

Second, Exademy produced the videos in such way that soon subtitles can be added easily to complement the soundtrack in English. This means that if you would like to share these videos with someone else, but you need to have them in a language different from English, there will be an option. You can get the subtitles files from Exademy, translate the texts yourself, and get a copy of videos with subtitles in your own language. We will keep you updated on the launch of this brand new service we will be providing.

Enjoy!

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.

Product update 397 is the second update in 2010 and we expect to deliver 2 more in this year, keeping up with the steady rhythm  of 4 updates a year that we have been delivering the last 2 years. With this release cycle we want to deliver to you continuous improvements during the year.

As of this product update all users of Exact Globe will be notified in Exact Globe of the availability of the new update and are directed to a product update news page. You can find all the highlights and other documentation of Exact Globe product update 397 from this page. We have seen that people are more satisfied when they use a newer product update. With this notification we want to bring the advantages of the new product update in a better way to the users so they are more inclined to use the new product update and in the end be more satisfied with Exact Globe.

So check out the highlights of the new product update, upgrade to 397 and become a more satisfied user!

This year the list of legislatory changes includes the new VAT rules for countries in the European Union and the Importer Security Filing (ISF) for the US legislation. All changes in payroll legislation are also included in this product update and substantial improvements have been made to Pick-IT.

More information about product update 396 can be found in the release notes for Exact Globe.

Photo credit: Optical illusion

New brand strategy: rebranding our products

This week we celebrate our anniversary and today we have reveilled a new brand strategy to the world. As you can see on this blog, a new visual identity with a new logo and a new tagline, ‘Exact. And it all comes together.”,  are part of this new brand strategy. We have launched a new website, all over the world our offices have been redecorated and the new logo already shines brightly on our new headquarter office that is under construction.

As a customer using Exact Globe, Exact Synergy and Exact Synergy Enterprise  you will notice that your product has been rebranded too. As of today, if you update or upgrade your software, our new visual identity will smile at you whenever you start your systems. Our Exact Online customers have maybe already noticed that the live environment of Exact Online has also been rebranded during the weekend.

For more information about our new brand strategy, please visit the new Exact corporate website. In the press release about our brand strategy you can also read the reaction of Bo Lykkegaard, IDC’s European Enterprise Applications Program Director.

Exact Online: more than 10.000 customers

But there is more to celebrate. Today we are also proud to announce that we are supporting more than 10.000 Exact Online customers in the Netherlands with growing their businesses. Thank you all for the trust you have placed in us! We will keep innovating and extending our Exact Online offering in the coming period of time, just like we have done in the past.

Product Update 395 now available

And like that is altogether not enough reason to have a party, today we have also made product update 395 for Exact Globe available for you to download. This blog is all about our products, so of course we have created a special blog post about product update 395 to show you what benefits this product update has to offer you.

If you would like to congratulate us with our anniversary: of course you are welcome do so in the comment section below.

The first one was Quality management, this second article about Incoming Invoice Register and this article is about Clustered Requests.

Clustered requests make it possible to create one single workflow for multiple identical requests. This solution enables you to group these separate requests for approval, realization and processing. In order to facilitate procurement the solution enables a purchase limit check on multiple stages within the workflow. Next to grouping request also requests can be copied automatically during the workflow process.

For more information, feel free to contact Marcia Vermeer at Exact Software. Click on the video for a brief explanation of the solution:

Photo credit: Guillermo

Exact Globe has the capability to import XML files. There are professional tools to turn an Excel sheet into XML and subsequently (using another tool) to map that XML file to the Exact Globe “style sheet”. That process is not for the faint-hearted as it requires technical knowledge and tools.

In this document, you can find links to Excel sheets containing makro’s that allow the creation of an XML file, that can be imported into Exact Globe, directly from an Excel sheet. The makros can be edited to your liking.

Photo credit: Barnoid

The first one was Quality management, this article is about Incoming Invoice Register:

Ever paid an invoice incorrectly and then struggled to get your money back? With Exact you can proactively prevent incorrect invoices from being paid. No paper workflow is required. Instead, you have a digital, time-saving process that is structured, transparent and traceable. Now it is you who will decide whether and when to pay incoming invoices.

For more information, feel free to contact Marcia Vermeer at Exact Software. Click on the video for a brief explanation of the solution:

Photo credit: mknobil