New utility gives quick access from single Windows tile

Windows 8 does away with the traditional Windows “Start” menu and instead uses a tiled Start screen that consists of tiled icons for built-in programs, such as Mail and Calendar, and for some applications you have installed.

For Windows 8, Synergy/DE version 10 installations will install one tile, and this will be for for the Workbench application. Start menu items, such as Synergy Utilities, Repository, and the DBA Utility, which were added by previous versions of Synergy/DE will not be added to the Start screen. You can navigate to any program by moving to the desktop (select the Desktop tile, or press the Windows key) and then using Windows Explorer.

To make things a little easier for Synergy users and developers, we have added a program, Synergy Control Panel (SYNCPL.EXE, located in the SynergyDE\dbl\bin directory), which gives you the ability to launch several Synergy utility programs. The programs you can access from Synergy Control Panel depend on what you have installed, and may include the following:

• Synergy Configuration Program (32-bit)
• Synergy Configuration Program (64-bit)
• Synergy UI Toolkit Control Panel (32-bit)
• Synergy UI Toolkit Control Panel (64-bit)
• xfNetLink .NET Configuration
• xfODBC DBA Utility

You can access the Synergy Control Panel  from the Windows Control Panel. If you would like to pin it to either the taskbar or Start screen, use Windows Explorer to navigate to SynergyDE\dbl\bin directory, right-click on the SYNCPL.EXE program, and select the option to pin it to either the taskbar and/or the Start screen.

For ease of use, you may want to pin other frequently used programs, such as the Synergy Configuration Program (SYNCONFIG.EXE). Desktop shortcuts can be created for developer tools, such as Repository, by setting the target path for dbr.exe, for example:

“C:\Program Files\Synergex\SynergyDE\dbl\bin\dbr.exe” rps:rps

Shortcuts can then be pinned to the taskbar or Start screen for easy access.