Welcome to the quarterly Product Newsletter for Q1 2023 (January, February, March).
SUMMARY
We are very excited to announce the launch of SynergyOS Workflow, our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) product designed for relationship-based companies such as financial services, law, consulting, and corporates.
There are many CRM products on the market designed for automated selling (for example, for selling a software-based product) where the main focus of the CRM is on email automation and marketing campaigns. On the other side, there is a reduced focus on CRMs for companies that are built on personal relationships. Professionals at an investment bank, a law firm, or a consulting firm, spend most of their time building and cultivating relationships, which may turn eventually into clients. We have built Workflow with this type of customer in mind, to make it easy to track those companies, the people work in those companies, and all the related activities and interactions. These interactions can be tracked though notes, conversations, emails, and tasks.
Going forward, we will include updates to both Drive and Workflow in the monthly and quarterly updates. We are also working on extending workflow into a new application called "Messages".
DRIVE
New search fields: author, file creation date, and file modified date
Now you can be more specific in your advanced search parameters to find information faster. The new field author is automatically created for each file and it's composed of the person who created/uploaded the file and every person that saved a minor and major version.
Convert old Office files to current format automatically (.doc to .docx)
You can now convert old Office file formats (.doc, .ppt, .xls) to the current Office file formats (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx) automatically with one click. Select the file you would like to convert and click on the convert button. We have also enabled a dialog to prompt you to update old files when you try to open them.
Lock and unlock files in bulk with an optional messages
New option to lock and unlock multiple files in bulk with an optional lock message. This can be used for offline mode when you are traveling.
View all your locked files
You can find all your locked files at once from a new section in the file explorer.
Folder shortcuts
Create folder shortcuts to organize your content better and navigate to another folder in a different location with one click.
Web bookmarks (URLs)
Save bookmarks to webpages within Drive so you can track relevant information from teh web right with your files. Bookmarks can also be categorized with tags and all the standard file functionality.
New Conversion features
We have launched a new feature that converts files from different formats, designed for document automation. The key file conversions are:
- Text: plain text, markdown
- Word (.docx)
- HTML
Copy several hyperlinks at the same time to paste in emails/chat.
You can now copy several items faster as hyperlinks to paste them into emails or chats, instead of having to copy items one by one.
Checkout: new feature to work on files offline and sync
Checkout allows you to save files to your computer in the Synergy/Working Copy folder. This way, you can access your checked-out files through Windows File Explorer / Mac Finder and edit them normally. Once you finishes your edits, you can sync back your files to SynergyOS through the Drive application.
This is very useful for two uses cases:
- Offline work: when you want to work on files without internet, for example, during a flight.
- Heavy files: sometimes you want to work on very heavy files (images or videos usually) and you do not want to constantly sync your changes to the server every time you click save.
More options to convert Office files to PDFs
In this release we are giving more options to convert Office files to PDF. You can use:
- Your local desktop Office application: our built-in integration directly uses your Office for pixel-perfect conversions.
- LibreOffice Server: now you can also convert files in the server with LibreOffice. This also works from the webapp, without the need to install Synergy Tools.
Better Compare functionality for Microsoft Word
We have improved the integration with the native compare functionality of Microsoft Word, to make your redlines faster.
WORKFLOW
We are very excited to announce the launch of SynergyOS Workflow, our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) product designed for relationship-based companies such as financial services, law, consulting, and corporates.
Projects
A central place to track all company projects. Project is the general name of the functionality but it can be customized according to industry conventions:
- Finance: Deal
- Law: Matter
- Consulting: Project
Projects represent very different types of activities: sales opportunities, partnerships, To Dos, and accordingly, can be categorized in different pipelines.
Contracts
All your legally binding documents in a central place to make it easy to track all signed contracts with metadata, including signature date, effect date, and expiration date. All original files are located in SynergyOS Drive and linked into Workflow.
Contacts
Internal and external contacts database with all related activities, including notes, emails, conversations, emails and files.
Companies
Companies database with all related activities, including notes, emails, conversations, emails and files.
Pipelines
You can customize the project pipelines to fit your best use case. You can have distinct pipelines for different activities. For example, you can have 1) a sales pipelines for new customer opportunities, 2) an internal projects pipeline for internal improvement processes, and 3) a marketing pipeline for different marketing activities.
Custom fields
All main entities (projects, contracts, contacts and companies) have pre-defined fields that store the most common types of information. For example, name, phone number or address are default fields.
We also provide an easy-tu-use functionality to create custom fields to make Workflow more powerful for your specific needs. For example, you might want to create a custom fields for contacts where you can include the name of who is the lawyer / advisor of a specific contact or company.
We have released different
Email filing
With the new SynergyOS Outlook add-in (link) you can save emails into Workflow and assign relationships to contacts, companies, projects and contracts. This way, you can easily track relevant information from all those entities and easily share email information from anyone from your company without having to forward emails all day to any new team member.
Notes
Notes help you to write and organize information about any entity (contacts, companies, projects and contracts). This way you can log information about a call, a LinkedIn message, or a WhatsApp chat, so you can find the relevant information faster.
Notes also help you to track what files you share with people and companies outside of emails. For example, if you share a file through LinkedIn, you can log that activity too. If you share files though email, you can easily track that email and related files through the SynergyOS Outlook add-in.
Conversations
Conversations are similar to email threads but designed from the ground up for groups. Conversations also bring some of the good capabilities of chats such as reactions and interactivity. If you want to discuss any topic you create a conversation, select the type of conversation (general, review, approval, announcement) and then you can chat with your team.
Guest users can also be part of the conversation and will receive emails for every new message addressed to them. You can also save emails directly into conversations, so you always have the right information in the right place.
Tasks
Emails, notes and conversations are different ways to save and log information. Many times, that information requires someone to do something: a task, in other words. Tasks helps you to create and manage your To Dos from a unified place, with a reference to the original source of information that motivated the creation of the task.
Search
Saving all this information in Workflow is very comprehensive so it also requires a very powerful search capabilities to fins any information you are looking for. Workflow incorporates SynergyOS state-of-the-art search capabilities to fins anything instantly.
2023-04 Roadmap
The upcoming features on our roadmap for April include:
- New functionalities in Workflow
- Client feedback for new functionalities: we believe Drive has reached a maturity point and we would like to find out what new functionalities our partners would like to improve their workflow
The Synergy team