Release notes

This month's product update is all about enabling your project businesses to work remotely more easily by connecting Synergy with SharePoint for document control.

Here at Synergy, we pride ourselves on being a pure cloud product. How businesses and professionals are now thriving remotely (or not) has demonstrated the benefits of cloud software like never before.

We understand some companies may be a bit lost about how to lessen the impact of Covid-19 on their business. With this new release we are joining our software with Microsoft SharePoint to give you the tools you need to work from home, more effectively. This was in our product development roadmap for later in the year, but we brought it forward and accelerated its development to solve Covid lockdown-related working challenges now.

Introducing the SharePoint document control connected app which your business can use to keep collaborating with your colleagues and connected to your customers.

If you don’t know already, document control is all about using Synergy as your ‘filing cabinet’ to save the finalized documents while working in SharePoint on your drafts. Synergy’s Sharepoint for document control connected app is a paid add-on to your subscription, but we’re making it free until January 2021 for Synergy Business and Enterprise customers. Did we say it’s free? Yes, we did. Make sure to also check out the enhancements we made to the planning board, resource planning and the work breakdown pages which will make your lives all that much easier.

SharePoint document control

This great new feature will help you get into SharePoint and take advantage of the benefits a cloud storage system has to offer. We help you set it up, and then help manage files going in and out of your practice.

• When you create a project, Synergy creates ‘working folders’ in SharePoint. You can control who has access to what folder. Do this for your template project folders or for an individual project. Set up projects, including SharePoint working folders, super-fast. Read more
• When you create or edit a document in SharePoint, you are warned in Synergy if a document has been updated. It’s really easy to identify changes, and it’s one click to add the new SharePoint files as the latest revision in the Synergy document register. Read more

• When you set up SharePoint document control for the first time, ask yourself if you want to sync your entire back catalogue of projects to the cloud or only projects created after a certain date. The sync works in the background, so you can keep using Synergy. We do the heavy lifting for you.
• It’s super important that you’re on the same page as your customer and keep accurate audit trails. The SharePoint document control connected app takes steps to address this, so that in Synergy you will always have the version you shared with stakeholders, thereby minimising your litigation risk.
• Are you sold, yet? Go ahead and add SharePoint for document control to your subscription from the subscriptions page. Read more

Resource planning

• We know you are all busy people, so we’ve made the re page even more usable with some design updates.
  • Use the new cog setting to show hours in the resource planning grid. 

• • Use the new sorting functionality to sort the list by rate, availability or name.
• Wouldn’t it be great if you could edit the hours each resource works on a project? Well we’ve gone ahead and done that. You can now edit the hours a resource is assigned to stage from the resource planning page. 

Planning board

• Working from home and a bit lost on what week it is? Same. We’ve put what week of the year it is and the dates in the header of the resource planning, project planning and schedule pages to help you identify what week you’re in.
• If you loved the budget indicator at the stage level from the last release, you will love how we’ve replicated this for the project and phase level. See how any of your projects are tracking at a glance (you know you want to).

Project schedule

The schedule page automatically refreshes when you change the dates.

Work breakdown page

• Sticky date pudding, cinnamon buns, or cream eclairs… Who doesn’t love sticky treats? In this release, you will love how the header rows in the work breakdown, budget and budget vs actual views now ‘stick’ to the top of the page, when you scroll down the list. How’s that for a treat?

Cash expenses

You can upload a photo from your image library in the cash expenses page — we assume that will be a photo of the receipt, not your lunch.

Internet explorer

We rid ourselves of old baggage and said see ya later to Internet Explorer and now no longer support this browser. If you use Internet Explorer, it’s time to change to something more current, like Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome.