How AEC businesses and professionals are now thriving working remotely (or not) demonstrates the benefits of cloud software, like never before. We’re extremely proud that Synergy is a pure cloud solution.
We understand that some businesses may be unsure how to lessen the impact of COVID-19 on their business. In our May release, we’re joining forces with Microsoft SharePoint, to provide you with the tools you need to work from home, more effectively. The SharePoint add-on for Synergy (also known as SharePoint for document control) was in our product development roadmap for later in the year, but we brought it forward and accelerated its development to solve COVID-19 lockdown-related working challenges now.
We’re delighted to introduce to you SharePoint for document control, an integration between Synergy and SharePoint that’s designed to help you improve collaboration with your project team, and stay connected to your customers. As the name suggests, it’s also designed to improve document control — by collaborating on draft versions of project documents in SharePoint, and using Synergy as your ‘filing cabinet’ to save your finalized project documents.
SharePoint for document control is a paid add-on to your subscription, however, it’s free to trial until January 2021, for Synergy Business and Enterprise customers.
But that’s not all! Continue reading to find out about the other updates we’ve made in this release — to the planning board, resourcing planning and the work breakdown pages — that are all designed to make your work life easier.
NEW — SharePoint for document control
SharePoint for document control connects Synergy with SharePoint.
When you create a project in Synergy, Synergy creates working folders in SharePoint. You’re able to control who has access to each folder. You can do this for your template project folders, or for individual projects. Set-up is super fast.
When you create, or edit, a project document in SharePoint, you’ll get a notification in Synergy. It’s very easy to identify changes, and it’s only one click to add the new SharePoint file as the latest revision in the Synergy document register.
When you set up SharePoint for document control, you’ll just need to consider if you’d like to sync your entire back catalogue of projects, or only projects created after a certain date. Good news though! The sync works in the background, so you can continue using Synergy. We do the heavy lifting for you.
We also know how important it is for you to remain on the same page as your customers, and to be able to maintain accurate audit trails. SharePoint for document control helps with this — in Synergy, you’ll always have access to the version of a project document you shared with a stakeholder — minimizing your litigation risk.
Sound interesting? You can add SharePoint for document control to your Synergy Business or Enterprise subscription from the subscription page.
Find out more about SharePoint for document control.
Read the blog on SharePoint for document control by Synergy’s product manager, Paul Hemmings.
UPDATE — Resource planning
We’ve made some design updates to our resource planning page, to make it even more user-friendly for you.
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.
Also, you can now edit the number of hours a resource is assigned to a stage from the resource planning page.
UPDATE — Planning board
We’ve added the week of the year, and dates, to the header of the resource planning, project planning and schedule pages, for greater clarity.
We’ve replicated the budget indicator (at the stage level in our previous release) for project and phase levels. We’ve made it easier for you to see how any of your projects are tracking, at a glance.
UPDATE — Project schedule
The schedule page now automatically refreshes when you change the dates.
UPDATE — Work breakdown page
We hope you 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.
UPDATE — Cash expenses
You can now upload an image from your image library, in the cash expenses page.
UPDATE — Internet Explorer
We now no longer support the Internet Explorer browser. If you use Internet Explorer, you’ll need to change over to Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome.
Visit the Synergy knowledge base to see the full release notes (Synergy login required).
