Adept 2015 Takes on Global Collaboration

Global collaboration is the name of the game in product development and engineering these days, and not surprisingly, the primary focus of Synergis Software’s latest upgrade to its Adept enterprise document management (EMC) platform.

The newly released Adept 2015 ushers in a number of new concepts in the area of collaboration that in small ways take a page from social networking conventions popularized in the consumer world. In addition, the company has paid particular attention to scalability requirements with this release to ensure it has the horsepower to accommodate Synergis’ increasingly globally-dispersed clients.

“Within our customer base today, it’s very rare to have any customer that is a single location,” said Scott Lamond, Synergis’ vice president of Sales and Marketing. “Today, there’s much more of a need for scalability to ensure the product performs better for customers collaborating across a global network in complex multi-site, multi-department environments.”

Specifically, the 2015 upgrade has been reworked to ensure it can support users with hundreds of thousands of Windows folders running over a global network with optimal performance, Lamond said. In addition, search performance from a Web client has been dramatically improved — again, in keeping with the idea that more users in different time zones and from different locations need to tap into the Adept repository to support global collaboration.

“Performance and scalability is key and we put our energy there with this release,” noted Lamond. “Log-in times are three times faster and far more consistent. In the past, the more users that were on the system, the slower the next log in would be. We’ve eliminated that problem with this release.”

Sharing enhances Adept user collaboration by allowing users to share such items as saved searches, favorites lists, and transmittal searches and templates with other Adept users. Image Courtesy of Synergis

Also new to Adept 2015 is a concept called Sharing, designed to simplify and streamline how a global team of users collaborates, inspired by conventions driven by the rise of social networking. Adept 2015’s Sharing functions let users easily share more than documents, including saved searches, favorites lists, report templates, transmittal templates and searches, among other items. In addition, through a new personal group capability, users can share these items with entire groups as opposed to previous releases that limited the exchange to individuals. Users employ the personal group function to create an ad hoc group of users — say those working on a common project or in a similar discipline like product design — and can then easily exchange information and engage in other forms of collaboration.

In keeping with the spirit of improved collaboration, Synergis also took steps to address the difficulties common to previous versions of the software to find and create user lists to share documents and other design-related data. Adept 2015 introduces a feature called Circles, which borrows from the Google+ and Facebook “friends” paradigm. Users invoke the Circles function to create a compounded group of users who need to collaborate without having to go through the lengthy process of creating long user lists.

“Features like personal groups, sharing and Circles improve the ability to collaborate with people with whom you work with most commonly or even on an ad hoc basis,” Lamond explained. “We’re trying to make [collaboration] more real time, more meaningful, and usable for remote teams.”

One other area enhanced to aid in collaboration is transmittals, which is a critical feature for Synergis clients sending off large collections of documents, drawings and even CAD files as part of a collaborative project. Adept 2015 has expanded search capabilities and exposes previously inaccessible data that is pertinent to the data exchange, making it easier for teams to create, manage, and find critical materials that were part of a transmittal.

Adept 2015 includes a new tab in the Relationship Browser (RB) dedicated to transmittals. Image Courtesy of Synergis