It's not
often we get a chance to do an in-depth hands-on review of a
document and data management solution, the complexity of
installation and implementation representing far too high a
hurdle. But after visiting with Synergis Software several months
ago, we concluded that the company’s Adept software might be an
exception to the rule. Adept provides a single point of control
for managing engineering drawings, business documents, and
related information via a LAN, WAN, or across the Internet.
Document management is a basic tool for any organization that
wants to centralize, control access, and organize their
engineering and business documents and automate engineering
change processes. Synergis has spent more than 18 years
developing its document management software. The company
actually has two divisions. Engineering Design Solutions is an
AutoCAD VAR; Synergis Software develops, implements, and
supports the Adept software. Synergis’ initial forays into
document management were efforts to solve the specific needs of
several of its AutoCAD customers.
Complex Initial Setup
The first step was to install the MySQL software and then
create a new schema and a user account with administrator
privileges so that we could configure software parameters. We
also had to set startup variables for Adept. This was quite an
involved process, accomplished only by carefully following
Chris’ instructions, but according to Mr. Fabri, while some
customers do these initially steps themselves (after first
attending training at Synergis’ headquarters), typically someone
from Synergis goes to the customer site to help with this
initial installation. Once completed, the customer typically
never needs to touch these settings again.
After installing and configuring the database and Adept
server software, the first step as an Adept administrator was to
use the Adept Designer software component to create a new
database and design the first “library card,” the actual
database interface screen that individual users would see when
interacting with the document management system. Here we were
able to select the database fields that we wanted to track. We
could add, delete, or modify field names we wanted displayed and
graphically design the appearance of the Adept library cards
using a very intuitive interface.
The library card is one of the primary ways of viewing data
inside Adept. Synergis provides a very intuitive Designer
application enabling users to create new library cards. (Click
to view larger image)
We also set up various user accounts and assigned them to the
appropriate user groups. For example, engineers on a particular
project may need to save new versions of documents while sales
personnel only need to be able to view documents, and employees
not working on that project don’t need to see it at all.
Of course, only administrators have to deal with any of the
functions we had to tackle in our initial implementation.
Regular users see none of this. They interact only through the
Adept client software, which was the final component we
installed. The client software is typically the only component
that gets installed on individual users’ systems. Synergis
offers two types of Adept clients: a full-featured Desktop
version for people who need to create and modify documents and a
thin web-based Explorer client for those who need to access and
review documents and information stored in Adept in primarily a
read-only mode.
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