CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
18 May 2005
Product News
Synergis Software Announces Adept 6 EDM with Support for SQL Databases to Track Millions of Documents Throughout an Organization
Synergis Software, an independent division of Synergis Technologies, Inc., announced Synergis Adept® 6 engineering document management (EDM) solution - the company's most significant release since 1997. Available next month, Adept 6 offers new SQL database support including MySQL Classic 4.1 out-of-the box and support for Oracle 9i to track more than one million documents of any type; enhanced Workflow to further automate business and approval processes inside engineering and other departments; Major/Minor Versions to provide easy storage, retrieval and tracking of incremental versions; and Inherited Rights to visualize and assign rights to Adept Libraries in an Explorer type tree structure. In addition Adept 6 supports leading CAD and Office applications including AutoCAD® versions 2004, 2005, and 2006; Autodesk Inventor® versions 9 and 10; Autodesk Inventor® Professional versions 9 and 10; SolidWorks® versions 2005 and 2006; ARCHIBUS®; Adobe® PDF files; and bi-directional document property updating for Microsoft® Word and Excel 2003.
"Adept allows us to leverage data for smarter decision-making. This means we are able to generate more output while balancing shrinking resources, justifying existing resources, and describing resource impact on mission success," said Paul Herold, Director of the U.S. Coast Guard Civil Engineering Technology Center. "Adept has helped our Engineering department save tens of thousands of dollars on printing and mailing costs, eliminate the print room, and reclaim office space. We are now looking to Adept to extend beyond Engineering to manage data throughout the organization as a key part of our Shore Facility Capital Asset Management program."
"We expect Adept to help us achieve one of our key business objectives in 2005 - to increase production of our buses from 20 to 26 a week during the current improving economic climate and to be the most cost effective transit bus manufacturer in the nation," said Jim McKittrick, CAD Manager and Adept Systems Administrator at Gillig Corporation, a privately owned commercial bus manufacturer in Northern California. "In order to achieve this goal, it will require improvements across the board, including improved workflow procedures to our Synergis Adept system, integrating Inventor with Adept from Autodesk Mechanical, leveraging MySQL database to connect to other databases, and last but not least, streamlining the shop floor interface so that Adept Workflow triggers an email in Lotus Notes that goes directly to the shop floor supervisors."
New Feature Highlights
Adept 6 offers numerous new features to improve user and administrator productivity and document management scalability:
.SQL Database Support - Adept 6 now supports MySQL Classic 4.1 and Oracle 9i with future support for Microsoft SQL Server 2000 to satisfy standards requirements and allow users to track more than one million documents of any type without sacrificing simplicity for power. Adept 6 will ship with MySQL Classic 4.1 at no extra charge. Oracle or SQL Server licenses must be purchased separately from their respective vendors.
.Enhanced Workflow - Adept 6 offers a more sophisticated Workflow engine at a fraction of the price of other EDM products. The new enhanced Workflow enables users to further automate business and approval processes inside engineering and other departments. Simple and complex workflow rules can be configured and implemented quickly according to department. It enables users to specify steps along a workflow path, where each step requires review, and allows anyone to see the status of a document.
.Major/Minor Versions - Adept 6 provides easy storage, retrieval and tracking of incremental versions. With the ability to track and store Major and Minor versions in Checked Libraries, Adept 6 will store a "minor version" every time a document is signed in to the Holding area. This feature enables users to recover intermediate work during a complex development cycle. It offers an easy method to quickly revert to a previous version and more granular tracking of work in progress.
.Inherited Rights - Users can now visualize Libraries in an Explorer type tree structure. To expedite administration, new "Library administrators" have the ability to assign rights at the top of a Library folder and have those rights automatically inherited down the tree of the library. This feature also helps de-centralize administration from a single Adept Administrator for the entire system to Library administrators for separate divisions or departments.
.CAD and Office Integrations - Adept 6 multi-platform functionality supports AutoCAD versions 2004, 2005 and 2006; Autodesk Inventor 9 and 10; and Inventor Professional 9 and 10; SolidWorks 2005 and 2006; and bi-directional document property updating for Microsoft Word and Excel 2003. Adept can extract property fields from Word and Excel as well as "push" data from its database to populate Word and Excel properties. Adept can track virtually any type of document, including PDF, TIFF and other files.
.Other Enhancements - Adept 6 offers numerous other enhancements including improvements to the user interface for a better user experience, more powerful tools to manage and "normalize" data, detailed audit trail functionality, and simplified system administration.
"With this release, we are continuing to provide clients the scalability they need to grow document management throughout the organization, to reduce the up front implementation time, improve performance across distributed design groups, and further automate the engineering change process," said Todd Cummings, director of Research & Development, Synergis Software. "Now in our 18th year, we are proud to maintain our record of providing clients with the best support, implementation and service in the industry."
Pricing and Availability
Synergis Adept 6 offers engineering document management at a suggested retail price of US$1,095 per concurrent license and US$219 per annual subscription license for the MySQL version. Upgrade pricing is also available. Please contact Synergis for Oracle and MS SQL pricing or more information on Administrator training, Update training and other database migration services.
Synergis Adept 6 software is available worldwide next month directly from Synergis and through strategic resellers in North America. For more information or to register for a live presentation of Synergis Adept 6, please contact Synergis at 215-529-9900/800-836-5440 or visit http://www.synergis-adept.com .
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