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!

The ESS portal gives your employees access to their personal data in a secure and transparent environment. As an employee you can for instance enter or change your time off period, enter an expense claim or change the personal address. This undoubtedly leads to reduction of administrative costs.

In the new simplified version of Exact Synergy, that will be available as a beta version in product update 244, we particularly focus on ESS features. One of them is Time Off.

The screenshot above is the entry part of Time Off. As you can see the screen is truly focused on getting the task of asking time off done easily. Also the user is presented the information he or she naturally needs, for instance “What is my balance?” The entry fields are linked based on the choices the employee made so the employee can quickly fill in the request and ask for approval without being confronted with unnecessary fields that may be left blank.

Now you can ‘dream’ about how to spend your personal time while entering the request instead of the think about which procedures to follow to enter a time off request. And that makes a lot more fun…

If you have any questions regarding this post, please create a comment to this article.

Image credit for the header image: neloqua.

So what’s new on the menu?

Appetizer
Do you want to start with something small to whet your appetite?

With the below small improvements and new possibilities you have more freedom and control on reports.

• Link and use more Synergy Enterprise entities in reports, e.g. items, opportunities and more default values
• Use same report definition but with different security/defaults by supporting linked reports, instead of creating new reports
• Improve management functions (security on report groups, link modules to report groups, hide reports in the report tree view)

Main course
Would you like beef, chicken or fish?

Having reports delivered via email by supporting subscription on reports allows you to view reports in MS Outlook or other email applications.
Viewing reports in multiple web browsers gives you even more freedom and control on how the reports should be served.

Dessert
Interested in pie or some ice cream? 

With the possibility to show and compare information from different sources in one report, you can make these key decisions faster.
Together with the support of drill down and drill through you can get a detailed insight, which helps you in your decision making.  

Coffee
Anything else?

By supporting more data sources types (OLE DB and ODBC) you can show information from almost any product in your reports.

Are you still hungry or thirsty?
Please let me know what you would like to have via a reply or mail so we can serve you even better.

Photo credit: macten

In the coming product update (244), we extend the IIR functionality with a document previewer, which shows automatically a preview of the scanned invoice that is attached to the IIR request. The big advantage is that the resource does not need to click on the hyperlink to open the attached invoice. The document is already visible in the request and the resource can directly compare the content of the invoice with the financial transaction lines in the request.
This saves the user a lot of time.

If you have any questions regarding the IIR document previewer, please create a comment to this article below or let me know directly via vincent.henricks[at]exact.com.

Image credit for the header image: cybrgrl (from Flickr).

Our Natural Persons Add-On makes it possible to enter natural persons (contact persons) in Exact Synergy and Exact Synergy Enterprise and link them to multiple accounts.  Take a look at this video:

Natural Persons Demo

It is designed to be big, because it automates core processes of small and medium businesses, from opportunity management to back office reporting to purchase request handling. It is customizable to fit the needs of individual customers and contains plenty of useful features.

Product management, of course, 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 release.

While these demo videos focus on bigger stories, there are lots of small valuable features in Synergy Enterprise that make everyday life of our users easier. But we also know that our users are industrious and enterpreneurial individuals, regardless of their job functions, and they have little time to spend learning how their software works.

To help them, product management has 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, our 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, and do come back from time to time, because more good stuff is coming soon.

And if you have suggestions how to make these videos even better, or know an excellent tip to get filmed, please drop a line to Aimee Swartz-Glancy or Jason Hopkins, the creators, or to Vladimir Bataev, the product manager.

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.

Benefits
The integration of Reporting Services into Synergy Enterprise, enables you to adapt all important functionalities of Reporting Services.
Benefits or important functionalities of Reporting Services are:

• Create flexible and graphical reports
• Use different data sources for the reports
• Export reports in different formats like PDF, Excel and Word.

This integration offers the below possibilities from within Synergy Enterprise:

1. Store reports in Synergy Enterprise.
2. Create various data sources and link them to reports.
3. Deploy reports from Synergy Enterprise to a Report Server.
4. Assign specific roles (rights) to reports.
5. Export reports in different formats, e.g. PDF, Excel and Word.
6. Save reports as a document (snapshot).
7. View reports as a web part on e.g. your homepage (dashboard).
8. Several entities can be used as filter in reports to show specific related data.

One
With Reporting Services Integration you have one central system with the functionalities of Synergy Enterprise enriched with Reporting Services.

Data sources
SQL Server and SQL Server Analysis Services data sources can be created and linked to reports. This allows you to show reports on other products, beside Exact Synergy Enterprise, which uses a SQL Server database, e.g. Exact Globe.

Security
Roles can be assigned to reports. This gives you the flexibility and possibility to control rights to reports, in the same way as you are used to do for other data or functionality. So create a report once and limit the data shown on the report, based on a user’s role within the company.

Snapshots
Reports can be saved as a document (snapshot). This offers you to create an archive of results. This can be used for comparison with the current result.

Dashboards
Reports can be viewed via web parts on your homepage as well on other on other pages. With this functionality you can create your own dashboard which gives you directly clear insight into your business processes in order to make optimal key decisions.

Entities
Reports can be started from several entities in Synergy Enterprise, e.g. person’s card, account card and project card. The great thing about this is that you design a report once and when started the content is automatically about the customer at hand, such as the outstanding amount of the customer.

Stay tuned about the next steps in giving you more control over your business.

Photo credit: Naddsy

• Multi browser support.
• Support of latest SSRS versions and features.
• Reports built with the Microsoft report building tools.
• Easy management of deployed reports.
• Support for Web parts.
• Deployment and access to reports via Synergy roles.  

Multi browser support.
In March 2010 Exact announced the start of the project: Multi-browser support of Exact Synergy Enterprise. This requirement made the answer to the next question relative easy to made: Will we retrieve and render the data on the web server or on a Reporting Services report server? Retrieve and rendering of reports on the web server can be done with the Report Viewer control. This has some advantages however it conflicts with our goal to support multiple browsers.  This means that Exact Synergy Enterprise will render all SSRS reports on a Reporting Services report server. You have a license to use reporting services as long as the reporting server is installed on your database server. If you install a seperate reporting server you require an additional license. More information about SQL 2008 licensing can be found here.  

Support of latest SSRS versions and features.
In every new version of SQL server, new features will be added to Reporting server. Especially in SQL 2008 R2 a lot of nice reporting features are added like 

Maps, Sparklines, Databars and Indicators.  

Reports build with the Microsoft report building tools.
Microsoft made excellent tools to build reports and make use of the new features. For instance:  

• Report Builder 2.0  for SQL 2008
• Report Builder 3.0  for SQL 2008 R2. At this moment availabel in the CTP version. As of June with the launch of SQL 2008 R2 commercial availabe.
• SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio.

Easy management of deployed reports.
After building a SSRS report, you should deploy the report to the reporting server. The deployment of SSRS reports can be done via the Synergy user interface. This includes deletion of deployed reports and the re-deploy of reports to a new or additional reporting server. 

Support of web parts.
Web parts are a nice way to build your own dashboard. As of Exact Synergy Enterprise we support web parts on the home page of a user. 

Deployment and access to reports via Synergy roles.
To deploy reports via Synergy you should have the role Report manager. To access a report you should have the role which are linked to the reports. This can be existing roles but also new created roles.

I hope you will enjoy the integration of Reporting services in Exact Synergy Enterprise.

Photo credits: SOCIALisBETTER

On behalf of the Product Management team, I am pleased to announce that Exact Synergy Enterprise will move into the controlled release phase for product update 243 as per April 9. Our stakeholders were very helpful to verify the functionality for this update. Your feedback is very much appreciated so that we can make this update general available. This new product update is planned to be generally available in May.

More than 30 customers are already lined up to participate in the controlled release and start using it. On top of that all of Exacts partners/resellers will be able to download the 243 release as well.

Vladimir Bataev posted the article ‘Five highlights of the product update 243 of Exact Synergy Enterprise’ on March 31. A summary of the highlights:

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

 I will give you an overview of other items that you can expect in this update.

CRM

• Faster access to back office reports of the customers: quotations, sales orders and sales invoices are available from the account card;
• Complete controls over contact details for customer and reseller portal users with editable external references for social networks;
• Multiple contacts can be added during account import;
• Richer mail merges with additional tags for the main debtor;
• Opportunity management: tighter control over reasons why opportunities get lost.

 HRM

• More flexible absence calculations based on calendar and working days;
• Improved absence balance overviews in hours and per 4 weeks in the absence and cost analysis reports;
• Instant Visibility of Information in Competency, Performance Review, and Target Agreement Profiles;
• Easier overviews on people search results with sorting on various columns.

 Business users

• Business users can take part in workflows, because roles can be assigned to them;
• A Business user can edit documents that he or she created;
• Business users can see all requests and documents attached to their customers.

 Employee Self Service users

• Employee Self Service users can now participate in workflow routing. It is now possible to add roles to employees who are assigned the Employee self service user license type.

 Data synchronization

• Near real-time data synchronization between Exact Synergy Enterprise and Exact Globe. This offers customers who are currently using Exact Globe and Exact Synergy (asp) in an integrated scenario, to migrate to and start benefiting from Exact Synergy Enterprise.

 Smaller enhancements

• Synergy Office Integration: an easy overview of unread activities;
• Support for fully-fledged CRM template in the templating tool;
• Customizable project and contact cards;
• Filtering on pending remarks so that it is easier to see what colleagues need to be poked.