As many of you already know, after a little over twenty-two years working as a Senior Consultant in the Professional Services Group, I recently transitioned to a new role as Product Manager here at Synergex. I’m excited about this change because it means that not only will I will have a much more significant role in determining the future roadmap for Synergy/DE and related products, but I also get to continue working directly with our customers.

One of the primary driving factors for some of the recent role changes here at Synergex is our desire to become more market-driven when it comes to determining future product enhancements. In part, we will achieve this by continuing to pay close attention to what the industry as a whole is doing. But a large part of our strategy going forward is based on working more closely with our customers when building new feature lists and future product roadmaps.

Product management is an entirely new area of expertise for me, and it will take some time to become fully competent in my new role. To help me with this transition, I was asked to attend a two-day Product Management conference, which I must say was an interesting and informative experience. I learned a lot, not least of which was that I learned how much more I have to learn!

I don’t want to criticize the event that I attended, which was on the whole very well put together, so I’m not going to name the event, which was attended by product managers from some large organizations that everyone would immediately recognize. It wasn’t an unusually large event; I estimate there were perhaps 200 people in attendance.

In the spirit of honesty, here comes the sales pitch! I have been attending Synergex conferences since the early 1990s, first as a customer, then as a partner, and later as an employee. I can honestly say that nobody does it better when it comes to offering an environment with such abundant learning opportunities AND the chance to network with peers. The conference I just returned from cited peer networking as a benefit also, but in reality, it didn’t happen. For whatever reason, many delegates didn’t seem to want to interact, but also, the event schedule and venue didn’t promote that valuable interaction either.

The 2020 Synergex DevPartner conference is being held in Sacramento, CA this year, and we all hope to see you there. If you have attended one of our events in the past, then you already know what an excellent opportunity it is. If you haven’t joined us in the past, I encourage you to not miss out on this unique opportunity this year. For additional information check out the conference website.

As I settle into my new role, you’ll be seeing more blog posts introducing things we’re considering, and some of you will hear from me directly as I try to extend existing relationships and build new ones. My point of contact with your company will be with some specifically nominated person, but I want to hear from all of you! If your life is in any way touched by Synergy/DE, or by related products such as Harmony Core, and you have something to say, good or bad, I want to hear it.

One way for you to provide feedback is through our Ideas forum, but if you prefer to contact me individually, that’s OK too. I’m not going to post an email address here because I don’t want to deal with a thousand replies from BOTs, but try first name dot last name at synergex.com. That should put us in touch.

I look forward to hearing from you.

The post conference workshop developed from the ground up a vinyl record collection catalogue system that allowed the management of your favourite records. The workshop stepped through the various aspects of the system including a desktop WPF maintenance program and remote management of your cloud based catalogue using the Synergy DBMS manager.

Having all your vinyl discs catalogued is great – but when I’m in the record shop browsing through all the latest available titles I often wonder – have I got this one? I’ve got a lot of vinyl’s and many more CD’s so remembering all the one’s I have can be difficult, and there is nothing worse than buying a duplicate.

So our OnVinyl app we built at the conference allows us to scan the barcode of the album in the store and check it against our catalogue – if we have it then the details are displayed and we don’t go and buy it again.

Getting all the album information into our catalogue would have been a long and rather boring job – especially having to trawl the web looking for the artwork to associate with each album we have. We need an easier solution – and so to Google we turn.

We all know how good Google is at searching for basically anything you can think of really, but did you know you can use this powerful searching capability from within your Synergy programs? Google provide a search API that allows you to simply and very easily perform any search you require. This is the facility we added into our OnVinyl Album Maintenance program – enter (or scan if you have a barcode scanner to hand) the barcode on the album and pass this through to the Google search API. Our implementation retrieved the album name, artist, cost and artwork so we are able to populate all the fields in the maintenance form – without any typing!

The Google search API provides a REST API that you can call directly from within your Synergy program. For full details visit https://developers.google.com/custom-search/json-api/v1/using_rest. To use the API you need a Google account. The first step is to create an “API key” which allows you access to various Google API’s and identifies you to those API’s. Visit the Google API Manager console to create an API Key. Once you have an API key then you can set up a custom “search engine” that allow you to customize how your searching is performed. You can limit the results to certain web sites for example. This is all configured using the Google control panel (https://cse.google.com/all). To begin you create a new “search engine” and name it. Once created it will be assigned a unique search engine ID – you’ll need this!

In your Synergy code define some constants;

The API is a REST implementation that has a defined URI;

And then make the required REST call to retrieve the search results;

And that’s the call to your custom search engine complete. The response from Google will be in the form of a JSON string which you need to parse and out and extract the individual elements you require. The code for that is available in the OnVinyl project.

And the results in your application;

Easy really is easy with Synergy and Google searching!

On a side note – I’ve been wondering where Jodah had got to, and then this appeared in my inbox;

I’m sure I recognise those eyes…. Have you seen or got a picture of Jodah’s identifying name tag?

This year’s DevPartner conference was held in Atlanta, Georgia and was a blast. I guess I say “the best ever” each year, so I won’t this time – but it was. The whole conference ran flawlessly, although throughout the week I did see a few strange things in the corner of my eye – but you know how it is. You think you are seeing things… But maybe not.

We had lots of new faces in the audience seeing what Synergy has to offer which is always great, and they got to see a few new faces presenting at the DevPartner conference for the first time.

Although Phil could be considered a veteran now – his third conference – he was joined on stage by first-timer Tate, a fellow support engineer. They presented a cool session on BOTS – not those things you sit on, the automated robots that answer whatever questions you have. There are loads of bots around and the duo showed us what it’s all about and how to build you own!

Another new face was Jacklin who presented all the ways to get fully up to speed with Synergy today including all the various media feeds and the cool YouTube channel we have that’s being loaded with great training videos – and of course you can always re-watch all the conference sessions.

At the beginning of March I blogged about “Physio My Way” which is an app to monitor a patients compliance to perform their prescribed upper limb exercises. Ashley presented the full Physio My Way story and received great feedback – if you get the time check out the Synergex YouTube channel in the coming days to see the full video! It’s a complete mobile solution written end to end in Synergy.

And so to my post-conference workshop. The goal was to write, from scratch, a complete application called “On Vinyl”. “On Vinyl” is a vinyl collection management and inquiry system. The system is written entirely in Synergy .Net and uses the Symphony Framework.

We started off by code generating the base data objects – the classes that expose the Synergy Repository structures as classes with full get/set properties for the fields. We also code generated classes to provide complete data management using Symphony Harmony.

Next we built a simple maintenance program to allow us to manage our collection of vinyl albums. To save typing we also implemented the ability to perform a Google search passing in the album barcode and returning/displaying all the album information, including the cover artwork. I’ll blog about just how easy it was to implement Google searching soon.

Next we hosted all the server logic on a remote cloud server behind Symphony Bridge and showed how to manage the data remotely using the Synergy DBMS Manager (available on the download page at www.symphonyframework.net).

Next we moved to the client portion of the project – to build and deploy an app on the Android and iOS platforms to enable us to check if we have a particular vinyl in our collection. We built up the technology stack. First layer was the client data layer – code generated data objects built into a portable class library. Next we created the connection library which used commands to search for vinyl details using the barcode:

If we didn’t have the album in our collection we could call our stored procedure to perform the required Google search:

And if we chose to buy the album we could insert it into our collection directly from the device:

Our final portable library was the common UI code – using Xamarin Forms. This provides the ability to write the UI once and deploy to different target devices such as Android and iOS.

Up to this point, although there were a couple of “what was that…” moment’s things all built and ran just fine.

The final piece of the puzzle was to write the device specific code – and our first target was Android. We created the project, added the required resource (images, etc.) and after a couple of minor typo’s the project built. But something was not quite right and we could not get the program to successful deploy and run.

We’d hit the end of the day so aborted the attempt and regrouped to try to find out what had gone wrong.  Once we have the solution I’ll post the entire project to GitHub and blog about it!

Now I don’t really believe in code gremlins, ghosts or phantoms, but throughout the week there were some strange goings-on, and to be honest I was having flash-backs to conference time 2009! Surely he was not back to try to mess up my workshop again?

And where did Jodah get to……?