In Exact Synergy Enterprise product update 248 (general available) we have improved the ease of use and speed of Exact Synergy Office Integration. We have also took a direct customer feedback into consideration which resulted in the following improvements. As of now Synergy Office Integration allows you to automatically save emails from certain folders directly to Exact Synergy Enterprise, based on a template set for those folders. You also have a possibility to deactivate option of automatic mapping of a contact person when saving an email. Moreover, Synergy Office Integration has been enhanced with numerous features, such as option to save multiple emails at once and pop-up notification to ask user to save an outgoing email.

Please watch the video below, to see how the new enhancements work.

Please let us know if you have any feedback.

You are planning a meeting with a prospect. Once you set date and time, you plan the meeting in Outlook and invite the prospect at your office. Also 2 colleagues of you will join the meeting. Sounds simple, but if you want to register this visit in Exact Synergy Enterprise and link it to the prospect card, it is time consuming.

Calendar management is a simple feature that can help you with this. When you plan your meeting or appointment in MS Outlook, you can link the prospect in your Outlook appointment. When the appointment is created in MS Outlook, it will be synchronized to Synergy and the prospect will automatically be linked. Besides the account, you can also link a contact person or a project.

For more information, take a look at the release note or watch the video (1.57 minutes)

As of today, Exact Synergy Enterprise product update 247 is generally available. This marks the end of controlled release period which started in the end of August.

Based on customers’ feedback, we have focused on multiple developments in the following license roles: Exact Synergy user, Employee Self-Service, Incoming Invoice Register and users with CRM role (video). For the customers who make use of Exact Synergy Office Integration we have introduced calendar management that allows you to link your project, account and contact to your appointment you create in MS Outlook (video). Moreover, as of this product update quotations are now fully integrated with Exact Globe, so the item information can be retrieved from Exact Globe and you can now select a division to be linked to your quotation.

All Exact Synergy Enterprise users who work with the standard functionality can now switch to the new Exact Synergy design that includes new features, such as customizable dashboards and enhanced mega menus navigation. Furthermore, the Exact Synergy Enterprise PSA solution make it now possible to plan people against a deadline and register costs of approved hours and expenses in Exact Globe.

Exact Integration launched in August has now new features, such as supporting the batch update of items and restoring database. To follow earlier introduction of Central Master Data Management for accounts and items, as of this product update it is possible to centrally manage General Ledger accounts (video).

Based on a direct customer feedback, we have also implemented a number of small enhancements, among others:

• Directly set status of project during creation
• Set opportunity status from Won to Undecided
• Full name of users displayed in timestamp
• New criteria to search for opportunities 

A full overview of all new functionalities you can find in the release notes and some additional information on the Product Update News page. Please also refer to previous articles on the Product Blog.

We would like to thank all customers, partners and colleagues who contributed to this product update.

Should you have any questions regarding this announcement, please comment on this blog post.

In product update 245 we introduce new features that you can use in the quotation module. You can now benefit from converting a quotation in Synergy to a sales order in Exact Globe. Moreover you are able to make quotations even more clear and legible.

Convert quotation to sales order in Globe

When you work with Synergy and Exact Globe, you can choose to convert a won quotation to a sales order in Exact Globe. The sales order can be viewed from the quotation card ones converted. Find all the details here

Make your quotation even more clear and legible

The quotation you send to your prospect is created based on a template. This template is a Synergy document linked to the quotation card in Synergy. As of this product update the template can be stored as a word document, which means that all MS Word functions are available to design your quotation. Together with the quotation merge fields Synergy Office Integration offers in MS Word, you got all tools in hand to make a great quotation your prospect can’t resist.

The installation of Synergy Office Integration (SOI) has been improved in Synergy product update 245 in order to make the process easier and more reliable.

End user installation

To make the installation process easier for a user, it is divided into two simple steps:

• Step 1 is to download SOI.
• Step 2: when you open an MS Office application for the first time, you can connect to your Synergy environment, by filling in the web address. User can also choose to do this step at a later moment.

To ensure that after the installation SOI works as expected, additional checks are added to the process: Check on supported MS Office version, valid web address, user credentials, Internet Explorer settings, server settings, document structure in Synergy and Office add-in installation.

Administrator installation

To make the end user installation process easier, it is separated from the Administrator installation. The Administrator installation is improved to even better support Terminal Server and Citrix environment in combination with roaming profiles.

• What are the differences?
• Which should you use?
• What Office versions are supported?
• How much longer will Office Add-in be supported

Microsoft Office is what most people are used to using for sending email, making appointments, creating documents, presentations etc. It works well for these tasks and everybody knows how to use it. Linking Exact’s collaboration tool Synergy with the Microsoft Office applications was a logical progression.

Since the introduction of Synergy we offered the “Office add-in” (OAI) for a tight integration with Microsoft Office.  In 2008 we introduced a new product to integrate Microsoft Office with Synergy:  Synergy Office Integration (SOI). With the introduction of SOI we offered our users a better user experience using latest technologies.

Where we continue to improve SOI, OAI is in maintenance mode since the introduction of SOI and is supported up to Office 2007.

SOI is the successor of OAI, but functionality is not copied over 1-on-1. We changed functionality a bit to improve user experience. In some cases this means we cut of functionality that is hardly used. What was the last time you used the ‘Link’ option to paste a Synergy URL in a Word document?
But we also added some new functionality, like the option to start a request the moment of saving a document or email.

If you are really interested in some more details, the list below shows the advantages of using SOI against the Office Add-in.

Photo credits: Beech boy

Microsoft Office, especially Outlook and Word, is widely used every day to create most of the content we make. A lot of this content is interesting or important enough to share it within your organization or eco-system.  Sharing these kinds of documents only happens when it is easy. For this, we introduced Synergy Office Integration (SOI), which has a tight integration between Microsoft Office and Synergy Enterprise.  SOI works on Office 2007 and we are working to support Office 2010 later this year.

SOI is used by our customers for about a year now. During this year we got a lot of positive feedback and some points of attention. We got a couple of requests to boost performance; the time to save an email or document to Synergy enterprise. In some environments this took too long and we decided to make this a focus area.

Lost couple of weeks we investigated the process of saving a document and booked some great results. In all situations we achieve a good performance boost, in some situations even up to 150%. If we compare the overall performance of Synergy Office Integration with its predecessor (Synergy office Add in), saving a document takes about 20% time less.

The performance boost is available as of product update 242. If you already run product update 242, please update to latest 242 version available.

For more information about SOI or to view a demo video, see the blog: Integration of Exact Synergy Enterprise with MS Outlook and other MS Office applications

Do you also spend a lot of time of your day in Microsoft Office and especially in Microsoft Outlook? Well, you’re not the only one.

Outlook is one of the main gateways to share information. The usage of email is easy and fast, although it also has some important downsides, which you are probably aware of. One of the downsides is that distribution of one email results in multiple email messages in a lot of local databases (Outlook folders). It is unclear who has and does not have the information available and when there is an update, not everybody might be aware. This is why an application like Synergy Enterprise is so important. Information is only stored once, and you can easily see who can see it. When a change is made, this is directly visible to everybody it concerns.

With Synergy Office Integration we have succeeded to have best of both worlds. Because you are so used to the MS Outlook interface, we made Synergy Enterprise available there. This means that all functionalities you know from Synergy, can now be accessed via MS Outlook.

We have introduced the Synergy toolbar in MS Outlook, which provides you exactly what you need: the options available here follow the user preferences. This means that the Synergy Enterprise options in MS Outlook are the same as the options you have using Internet Explorer.

Because you will not stop using your email, we also looked at how we could achieve a tighter integration between your emails and Synergy Enterprise. And looking to the positive feedback we received so far, I think we succeeded. We have introduced the ‘save’ button, which will give you the option to save your incoming and outgoing email to Synergy Enterprise with only 1 mouse click. If the email address is recognized, it will automatically be linked to the right contact person in Synergy Enterprise.

The email message in Outlook will be tagged, so you can easily see which emails are saved to Synergy Enterprise.

When you want to add more information to the email message, when saving it to Synergy Enterprise, you can select the ‘save as’ button to save the email message. Now you can add additional information and also create a request instantly.

Conclusion: no need to leave Outlook when you work with Synergy Enterprise. With Synergy Office Integration all your Synergy functionalities are available in MS Outlook. Next to MS Outlook we also offer a tight integration with MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint and MS FrontPage.

Photo credit: Shareski

Today is an exciting day for us: product update 241 for Exact Synergy Enterprise is generally available as of now! The Synergy product management team has been working hard on understanding the way you work, how your processes are designed and how we can fulfil your needs. They have translated that insight in powerful new solutions. Our colleagues at product development for their part, did an excellent job to create the new functionality that lets you do your work in a more efficient and easier way. We are sure that every user of Exact Synergy Enterprise can benefit from this new product update.

First of all we introduce to you a totally renewed Synergy Office Integration. It provides you with new opportunities to access your workflow, planning, and nearly all other Exact Synergy Enterprise operations directly from Microsoft Outlook. We know that many, many users of Exact Synergy Enterprise also use Microsoft Outlook and these two products are now joined in one single interface.

Also, a new screen for creating requests has been implemented, already introduced to you earlier in this blog post. We asked your feedback and we got it! Thanks for all your suggestions and comments.

New search functionality in this product update enables you to search for terms with diacritics, as explained earlier in this blog post.Product update 241 also introduces support for both Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008.

Over the coming period of time we will highlight some of the new functionality in this product update on this blog. Please subscribe to our RSS-feeds or e-mail newsletters so we can keep you informed.