As of today, Exact Synergy Enterprise product update 247 is in controlled release. This new product update is planned to be generally available by the end of September 2011.

The main highlights of this product update are as following:

• License roles improvements: Synergy user, Employee Self-Service User, Incoming Invoice Register user and users with CRM role (video)
• Calendar management with Synergy Office Integration to link your project, account and contact to your appointment
• Quotations 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
• New Synergy design includes new features, such as customizable cockpits and enhanced mega menus navigation
• Exact PSA solution with new functionalities and numerous improvements, such as planning people against a deadline and registering costs of approved hours and expenses in Exact Globe
• Exact Integration with new features, such as supporting the batch update of items and restoring database
• Central Master Data Management makes it now possible to centrally manage General Ledgers (video)

We have also implemented a number of small enhancements based on a direct customer feedback and suggestions, among others:

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

For a full overview of all new functionalities, please refer to the release notes for product update 247.

Should you have any questions regarding this announcement, please contact Bert Siekmann (Manager Product Management) at bert.siekmann@exact.com.

After publication of the blog “Saving time: Come out, Come out, wherever you are!” I got a lot of feedback on the article and functionality which could be divided into two groups. The ones that where extremely positive about the provided functionality and the ones that had some doubts and presented me with a more critical view on the feature. After examining the feedback and contacting some of you to discuss your views it was clear we missed out on the advanced user of Exact Synergy Enterprise with this feature. These users for example remember accounts by number, location and all sorts of other properties but never seem to view the card itself. Meaning it wouldn’t show up in the recently used view nor in the “my” view since they are not the manager of the account. This principle also applied to the other browsers we adjusted.

After the feedback round we concluded that we needed to react to these findings fast and update the functionality so we can support these advanced users in their daily work. In cooperation with you, our users, we decided to upgrade the functionality the following way:

• Setting the default value of the find-in box to the “all” view.
• Performing an immediate search after the find-in box is changed by the user; this will eliminate the need for an extra button click to get the documents in the selected view.
• Retaining the last selected find-in value for every individual search browser and individual user.

We are confident that the made changes are satisfactory for all our types of users. The changes will be available upon general availability of product update 244.

Happy finding!

Thank you for the feedback! We highly appreciate it! 

Photographer: healingdream

After months of designing, developing and many tests Exact Globe product update 398 is now general available. With this product update our local brands Grote Beer available in The Netherlands and Exact Pro in Germany will migrate to Exact Globe. Updating to product update 398 for those local brands means automatically start to work with Exact Globe.

For this product update we also did many, many, many legal changes to help you fulfilling your legal requirements. A few examples are:

• Support of Italian INTRASTAT return,
• Extended SEPA to Austrian legislation,
• Added additional Bank Formats.

We further extended the method Work-In-Progress Cost and Revenue; started to support Microsoft Office 2010 32-bit & Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and renamed Pick-IT into Warehouse Management System (E-WMS) to reflect its growing functionality and full integration into Exact Globe as a standard module.

Besides those bigger changes we also looked into the feedback you shared with us and based on your feedback we also made it possible to:

• Store more layouts in PDF format,
• Run the MRP cleanup tool also for production orders and stock allocations,
• Process unauthorized Incoming Invoice Register (IIR) entries when closing a period,
• Export ‘Flow of Goods report’ to Microsoft Excel.

The functionalities mentioned in this blog are just a few of all the improvements we did in product update 398. Check the product update news page for the high lights and video’s and check the release notes for an overview of all the improvements and their details.

In earlier articles on Features and Functions versus User Experience, Is simplicity the new gold and the Survival of the Sexiest I already referred to changing end user expectations. At Exact we take this very seriously and we do not only want to deliver useful products, but also want to create usable and desirable products. Creating excellent user experiences requires in depth knowledge about the user, their context, their needs and emotions. Therefor it’s essential to get the end users involved in the overall product design process in the form of creative workshops, feedback sessions, user research, surveys and many other involvements.

You the end user can join us shaping the products and services of the future. You will get the opportunity to share your knowledge on various business processes, get early previews and provide feedback on early design studies and even get an opportunity to visit our new head quarters in Delft.

All users, new and loyal, from a wide range of business processes are welcome. However we typically focus only on a few functional areas at the same time and this might mean that you have to be patient with your involvement.

Your call to action:

1. If you are a prospect or customer, leave a comment below if you are interested to participate and mention your field of expertise
2. If you are a partner, create awareness among your customers for this create opportunity
3. If you are an Exact employee, promote this among the customers you work with

If you are too shy or prefer to be less visible don’t hesitate to email me on: aad.hart@exact.com and I will make sure you get in contact with the User Experience team.

We are looking forward to work with you.

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

Our release planning for 2010 can be found in the illustrations below. As you can see, a lot of product updates are planned for next year: approximately 1 product update every quarter for each product line.

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

Often we receive questions from people that need to take documents from Exact Synergy Enterprise with them, for instance when visiting a customer. To Exact Synergy Enterprise product update 242 we have added a document downloader. Based on all your filter criteria you can easily download a set of documents (including the attached files). So if you are looking for a way to download all 2009 documents from a certain customer, just set the filters right and go ahead.

The document downloader is a small application that you install on your computer. It gives you the full document search to make your selection and do the download. Within your selection you can even make it more specific and you can also use search templates. The document body will be stored as HTML and all attachments in their original format.

The document downloader is part of Exact Synergy Enterprise product update 242, so get subscribed to the controlled release program and try it out yourself. The document downloader is a very usefool tool: it leverages the full advanced documents search and its possibilities are numerous.

In my previous blog post The advantages of Electronic Invoicing, I wrote:

“Since a few weeks we are sending all invoices to our Exact Online customers digitally. The monthly invoices are sent from our own Exact Globe environment to the digital mailboxes in Exact Online. With some simple mouse clicks our customers can first check the invoice and then create the entry into Exact Online with the invoice linked as an attachment. ”
 
As a lot of people are curious, and because “a picture says more than a 1000 words”, I created a small video, which will give you a sneak preview!
 
I am a member of the project group Electronic Invoicing within Exact and will update you frequently on this subject. If you want to share your thoughts, questions, remarks or advice about Electronic Invoicing with me, please leave a comment below. 

Photo credit: brendan.wood

For the upcoming new release of Exact Synergy Enterprise we will amongst others deliver a redesigned screen for creating a new request. Since this is one of the most often used parts of our application we wanted to improve the user experience of it and needed to be sure on how to do this best. Not just the looks-and-feel but we want to support every user better in reaching her goals: starting a new workflow in a simple and easy way.

Click image for full-size

So we did quite some research with a set of customers on how they use the current screen, how many request types they have, which ones they actively used et cetera. Now that the new screen is in controlled release we get mixed feedback on one specific part, via this post I would like to open up for more feedback to make sure we deliver the right experience to you.

Our user research learned us a couple of things which resulted in these design principles for the new screen:

• an average company will have over 50 different request types
• most users use about five to ten of them frequently
• the request type categories are not very well known within the user group
• searching for a specific less frequently used request is quite cumbersome and only a limited number of users is using the search option of Internet Explorer [CTRL+F] for this
• the request ID box is only used by a limited number of user to create a new request
• the majority of the users is unaware of how to use it or what to enter in it

Based on the findings we have redesigned the looks and working of the screen with the following three key parts.

• A list of the requests most used by you as a person
• An easy way to create a request by ID and request name
• A list with all available request types

Click image for full-size

The mixed feedback is especially on this last part. Since during our research we learned that a limited number of users where aware of the request type IDs (e.g. a Vacation request is number 103) we did not include them in the list. The ordering used to be on number but for people it is easier to scan alphabetically since the name of a request gives a better understanding than the number. For the unaware user it was hard to scan the list we learned. So our aim was to increase the readability and hence an easier recognition by just using the request names. The users which now the IDs are still served by the request creator, in this field you can either enter the code or the request name.

Via this post I hope to get more feedback on especially this part. Should the request IDs be re-introduced in the list and even more important what is for you the reason to use it? Maybe as a last remark, removing the request ID was not a goal by itself. During our user research of the last year we often got the feedback that the screens of Exact Synergy are quite loud, they offer a lot of options. Redesigning the complete request page has been done with keeping this in mind, make the screens easier to understand by offering less options and the options offered are a perfect fit for your goals. Please reply with your thoughts!