Fantastic Document on Exact Website Set Up

Once in a while you find a REALLY helpful document. Makes you feel almost like you found a gold nugget in your front yard. You'll need to log in to the Customer Portal to get to this as it's basically a Table of Contents with nothing but links to good documents on installing, setting up, maintaining and otherwise "care and feeding" of an effective web site and portal for Synergy.

Check it out.

Adding your Logo to the Left Pane

Did you know you can add your logo and a link to your company's website to the left pane in Synergy? It's easy. Exact has a short document that explains how to save the logo itself in the document repository and then link that document. See document 10.982.372 on the Exact Customer Portal. Or simply click on the title of this blog posting and you'll be taken to the Exact .Customer Portal to login

If you don't have access to the customer portal for some reason let me know and I can help you get set up.

Tip on Rejecting Documents in 372/9.5

The newer versions of Synergy allow you to Reject a document AND tell the creator why you rejected it. This is a lovely feature but doesn't seem to work out of the box. If you're getting an error to the effect of "Task can't create - Not allowed resource" here's the solution. When the document approver rejects the document and checks the box to inform the creator, Synergy creates a Task Request back to the document creator. The "out of the box" set up for that request type needs to be tweaked. The Resource field in the request needs to be enabled for ALL resource types, not just Employee resource types. Then the Task is created very nicely.

Security Levels in Synergy

Security levels in e-Synergy

Security levels are the easiest way to control access to documents in e-Synergy. There are other ways, including Division and Project, as well.

The basic rule is that the higher the security level, the fewer the number of people who qualify to see the document. A person with a given security level can see all documents (unless otherwise restricted) at or below that security level. Synergy comes with some security levels predefined. The rest are up to us.

Here are Synergy’s predefined security levels:

Security level
Description
Who can see/Example of use
0
The World
The general external public, for example prospects.

1
All customers
All customers as recorded in CRM can access this information.


2
All suppliers
All suppliers as recorded in Synergy can access this information.


3
Customer specific
Information can be seen only by the Customer whose account is linked to the item.


4
Supplier specific
Information can be seen only by the Supplier whose account is linked to the item.


10 - 98
Internal
Only associates can see this data. Most associates and many documents have a security level of 10.

99
Creator Specific
Only the creator of the document can see the document.

100
Resource specific
Resource (person) tied to the document, direct manager, HR personnel and Synergy administrators.


101
Project specific
Only project members can see this information. Useful for closely-held information.

Setting up Security Levels for Resources

When you first set up your Resources (the people in your organization who will use the tool), you need to give some thought to how they will interact with the documents you plan to store in the document repository. Every resource has a security level. The higher the level, the more documents that resource can see (with a few special exceptions). Normally then, the top management would have security levels higher than entry-level personnel.

You control level 11 through 98. (Levels 0-10, 99, 100 and 101 have special functionality built it and must be used as designed. See Exact's Customer portal document 15.567.559 for the basic explanation of levels.

I'd suggest you diagram out your "management levels". If you have an organizational chart that should help identify how "flat" or " "hierarchical" your organization is. Then assign security levels to each major tier. Leave several numbers between each tier for gradations within that tier and for changes in the structure.

Here's an example:
Top Management (Exec VP, President, CFO etc) = level 30
Vice Presidential = level 25
Director = level 20
Manager = level 15
Supervisor = level 13
General = level 10

Document Taxonomies

One of the first real struggles I had with Synergy was to try to set up a robust “taxonomy” (or classification system) for documents.. In one respect it’s not critical, as you can move documents fairly easily from one category to another. But the more documents that you have in the repository, the more work it will be. I did a small study of knowledge management to get ideas. Here’s one article that might help.

One of the reasons it is difficult to set something up for the entire Enterprise is that not everyone thinks like everyone else (or at least they don’t necessarily think like I do). So it’s important to talk to the intended users of the system to find out how they currently store documents and how they retrieve them. Most organizations today, unless they already have a formal document storage system, use their PC and network resources to store documents. So here’s where I went to look first:

Shared drives on the network – this is usually the biggest source of information
Shared folders in Outlook
Local drives
Intranet (if they have one)
Public web site
Outlook personal folders
Any existing software system that stores conversations, notes, etc

When I interviewed folks the vast majority were more than willing to help and willing to give up their “private stash” of information to help themselves and others.

Handling Remarks in Workflow

When you have lots of workflow it is easy to lose those that simply need you to read a Remark sent by someone else OR those that you have sent to someone else.

To see what YOU have been SENT by another, set the Action button to Remark and only those that others sent you will appear. Open the workflow item and, if you need to, add your comments on the actual request and then hit the DONE button. The person who sent you the remark will know you've seen it (the Remark indicator and your name will be removed from the stage the request is at).

When you send a remark to another user you can use the "exclude remarks" checkbox. It will REMOVE from view any workflow until the other person sees the remark and hits the Done button.

Don't forget, the Remark reminder is tied to the stage that the request is at. For example, if the request is at the Realize stage and you remark someone, don't Realize the request until the other person has a chance to see the Remark in their workflow. If you Realize the request before they see it, the Remark will be automatically Removed from the other user's workflow

Project Planned Start and End Dates as they relate to Project Members

When you create a project in Synergy you enter a start date and end date in the Planned Period area. Theoretically those dates represent when the project will start and when it will be finished. Ok. so what's the big deal? Well, those dates are used as the default start and end dates for the participation of the project members. When you add the members to the project you can leave the dates as is or adjust them to the actual dates that each member will be involved with the project.

There are several ramifications related to those dates as far as the project members are concerned. First, members know approximately how long the project will last and how long they will be involved. But more importantly, during the period covered by those dates, the members can easily find the project card. They can do that by simply clicking on the Left Pane "Projects" link. That link automatically links the user to all projects they are active members of.

What happens when you are past the End date? Aha! That's where this gets interesting. Once the end date passes for an indidual member's participation, they can no longer use the Projects link to find the project. And in fact the project can be difficult to find. Especially if you use the "Only Visible to Members" functionality. Once the end date has been passed for a member, that person is no longer considered an active member of the project.

So the moral of the story is, if you are the project manager, watch those dates. And if the project is still active, you may need to extend the end date for some or all of the members.

Adding Drop Down Boxes on Requests using Free Fields

You can easily add a drop down box to free fields when you design a request type. When you are on the Request Field Details page, go to the SELECTION area. The first box in that area is the VALUES box and this is where your drop-down choices go. For instance, to let the user indicate how a phone call was made, you could have "Inbound" or "Outbound" as the choices.

All you do is enter each choice separated by a semi-colon. The resulting Drop Down Box will help considerably in gathering cleaner, correct data, rather than allowing the user to enter free text.

Caveat - The first choice in the list is automatically chosen, especially if you make the field a "Required" field. So you might want to make the first choice something like "Choose One" or indicate in the field literal that the user needs to choose the proper response.

How to join the Synergy Virtual User Group

Click here to register for the Synergy User Group

We meet the Third Tuesday of each month. The week prior to the meeting you will receive an email notifying you of the time of day. We use Webex and a conference call for each meeting.

How to limit data in Request Types with SQL-like Criteria

To limit the data that is presented in a list box on a request, you can use SQL-like criteria as part of the design for a particular field. This is done via the "Selection" area of the Field Definition screen.

For example:

To limit an account list to customers and prospects use
c.cmp_type in ('C', 'P')

To limit an item list to a given assortment use
items.assortment in (0,1)

To limit to a range of items use
items.itemcode like '51%' (this will pull all items that begin with 51)

To limit to a single item use
items.itemcode like '0009'

Engage Conference Thoughts

Well, Engage 2008 has come and gone in a whirlwind of fantastic breakout sessions, general meetings and best of all, seeing old friends and making new friends! The user presentations were great with lots of ideas shared for new and improved ways to do things. The .NET version of Synergy was shown in some breakout sessions and was well received (now if only we could have it sooner rather than later...). The new Opportunity Management module looks terrific. Can't wait to use it. It supports multiple items and has very flexible sales cycle management. Workflow can export easily to Excel and the Document searches now have a "relevance" indicator which should help in deciding what to read.

Resources can now change how their Resource cards are displayed as well as changing the view on the Account cards. The "drag and drop" screen changes will make that lots easier.

Plus the process flow for Requests has been extended to 10 request types. Can't imagine a process that needs more than that. What fun it will be to design those flows.

We were all challenged by the creative ways users have found to improve their businesses. Even to the point of eliminating internal email almost entirely. How many hours would that free up for you??

There were lots more attendees than in previous years and many new Synergy users! That's great news. Hopefully many of them will get involved with the Virtual Synergy User Group meetings.

Next year's meeting will be in Nashville TN March 22-25.