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.

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

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

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.

“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

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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

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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!