On behalf of the Product Management team, I am pleased to announce that Exact Globe product update 401 is in controlled release. This new product update is planned to be generally available at the end of May 2011.

 A large group of customers are already lined up to participate in the controlled release and start using it. On top of that all of Exacts partners/resellers are able to download the 401 product update as well.

With our users’ needs in mind, we have added in this product update new functionalities that are important to our customers’ operation and will facilitate their business. Among others, we have enhanced Exact Globe with the following features:

• Central Master Data Management for Items is in extended controlled release
• B2B E-commerce Portal that facilitates wholesale trade and manufacturing companies in their need for optimizing electronic ordering process in a Business-to-business  environment 
• Handling of bounced and refunded collections in cash flow management
• For the Dutch customers of Exact Globe we introduce Rabobank Online. This solution offers online integration and automatic exchange of local bank payment files, bank collection files and bank statements with the help of the Exact Online platform.
• To better support manufacturing companies several improvements in production order entry, BOM and logistics have been implemented

Moreover in this product update we have further extended and improved support legal as well as banking requirements.

Based on direct customer feedback, we continuously improve our products. In this product update you will find among others the following enhancements: 

• Multilingual unit description supported in logistics
• Ability to fulfill Sales orders in combination with underpaid pre-payment invoices
• Update purchase prices based on sales prices

Additionally, the Word merge functionality in Exact Globe is now fully supported with MS Word 2010 thanks to the Content Controls solution.

More about this product update soon!

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On behalf of the Product Management team, I am pleased to inform you that as of January 6 Exact Globe product update 400 is generally available.

In this product update, next to the small enhancements based on feedback received from customers, we have focused on the year-end adjustments in the regional legislation and therefore we have included new functionalities that are crucial to your operations and will facilitate your business. Moreover, as of this product update Exact Globe supports SEPA direct debit schemes, so you can easily generate B2C and B2B national and cross-border euro direct debits in compliance with SEPA rules.

Additionally, we would like to inform you that the Central Master Data Management, which supports companies with multiple divisions in centrally maintaining information, is currently in the extended controlled release.

If you would like to find out more about above themes, check our Product Update News.

We look forward to receiving feedback or questions regarding this new product update.

In a sense your Synergy Enterprise environment is no different from a website of a good newspaper. There is always something new: a colleague uploaded a customer visit report, or registered the customer call, or updated the project that you are working on.

The question is how do you stay on top of these changes? How do you get informed that new content is there?

Well, you can add Synergy Enterprise pages with changing content to your favourites. You can look through the history for documents that might have changed since you last viewed them. But these approaches have their limitations: you won’t find out that a new document you are interested in was created.

You can always search for new documents manually every day, but that is a bit too much work.

There is a tried and true solution, of course — RSS feeds, and Synergy Enterprise supports them well. So instead of redoing your search for new documents every other day, you can just subscribe to the search results feed and put it on your homepage. You will see the new documents show up there automatically.

Watch the Exademy video to learn how to do exactly that, and more.

Have you ever tried looking for a document in Synergy Enterprise that you remember you read last Thursday, but don’t really remember its title anymore? Search cannot help you, because there is nothing to be searched: no number, no title, no keywords.

But there is hope, of course!

Whenever you view a document, a request, or a project, Synergy Enterprise puts its name on a special history list. The names are kept on this list long enough for you to forget about them, but not for Synergy Enterprise.

Hence, you can travel back in time to yesterday or to Thursday previous week or to any other day far away in the past and find exactly the document you read by scanning the list of names.

There is more than that. Not only documents, requests and projects are kept in Synergy Enterprise history, but also accounts, items and people, whose cards you viewed.

Watch the new Exademy tips & tricks video to learn how to make the most out of history today.

If you have been using Synergy Enterprise for a while, then you know already how to attach all kinds of Word, Excel and PDF files to documents. Still, sometimes, when you need to share a file with a colleague quickly, you first have to create a document, then attach a file to it, then create a request, link your document and only then send it to the colleague. That can get too time-consuming.

Now, here is another tip from Exademy: if you are running at least product update 242 of Synergy Enterprise you can attach files directly to your requests. You create a new request — an expense claim, a checked task to a manager, or any other one you can think of — and attach your files without creating an intermediate Synergy Enterprise document.

The video has all the details.

What is your favourite way to organize information in Synergy Enterprise? How do you usually keep record of the pages that you often use?

In the new tips and tricks video from Exademy you can check the best practices to cope with managing serious amounts of valuable information in Synergy Enterprise with favourites. If you are a new user, you will learn that in Synergy Enterprise pretty much anything can be saved as a favourite: a document, or a report, or a pivot chart. If you are already a Synergy Enterprise expert, take a look at the Exademy advice on best ways to organize favourites on your homepage.

The video is available here. Don’t forget to mark it as your favourite!

There is little surprise that Synergy Enterprise is a big software product.

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.

Crafting out our new solutions is always an exciting process. It starts with the first idea – whether it is based on market input, a concrete customer case or new technology – goes into customer validation, involves design, building and finally it is there. Although we always try to keep the customer focus – we can only build good software if it really meets your needs – a certain part of it is happening ‘behind closed doors’. About two months before we release a new product update to the market we get people in from different parts of the Exact Software organization and its ecosystem and we ask them what they think of the new product update. We brief them on the highlights, supply them with all release notes and focus areas and then they have a go at the software. Product managers desperately looking at their eyes to see what makes them tick.

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