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