Dear Synergetic Users,

We are pleased to announce that Synergetic v69 is now available.

Contents

Version Features

Synergetic v69's major functionality change relates to support for Single Touch Payroll (STP) - which is a mandatory requirement for all Australian employers (with more than 20 employees) from July 2018 onward.

The changes have involved some additional Payroll functionality and screen content; much of this is related to STP requirements but there are a number of interface changes that will be seen by all Payroll module users.

Australian Clients adopting Single Touch Payroll

• There are new pay code types and a new Reporting Category which replaces the PAYG Summary section.  These will need to be reviewed following v69 upgrade to ensure appropriate values are set for STP use.
• Changes to Payroll Employee Maintenance including new tabs.
• Changes to Superannuation Calculation Modes.  These will also need to be reviewed following v69 upgrade.
• Changes to Payroll reports to incorporate pay information utilising the new pay code types.  Any custom site reports will require review to ensure the new types are catered for (where appropriate).  
• New standard payslip report 
  Please note: the upgrade process will deploy a new standard payslip and will deliberately rename a site payslip version if it exists - this is necessary due to payslip content changes required by the ATO for STP.
  If you have a custom PAYSLIP report this will need to be customised before your first pay after the upgrade if you wish to continue using a customised report.
• New Finalise Pay process including a Process STP step.
• New End of Financial Year processes.

Please refer to our confluence space for more information: v69 - Single Touch Payroll (STP)

Clients outside Australia

Clients in other regions will see some of these changes to Payroll as listed below:

• Changes to Payroll Employee Maintenance including new tabs.
• Re-labelled Pay Code Types and Reporting Categories (was PAYG summary section).
• Changes to Superannuation Calculation Modes.  
• New Finalise Pay process

For New Zealand clients: There are more changes in store in future releases to accommodate the upcoming Payday Reporting needs of the IRD.

Please refer to our confluence space for more information: Link Coming Soon!

Upgrades

Please contact us via Service Desk to organise your upgrade. Upgrades to Synergetic v69 will be performed using the Octopus Deploy tool.

With any major release, we recommend that you first upgrade a test environment, to gauge the impact of the upgrade on your customisations or special use scenarios before moving on to upgrading production environments. There are no charges for upgrades of the Synergetic product set on instrastructure that complies with the product's minimum platform requirements. Environments that require infrastructure changes (server migrations, SQL Server upgrade etc) will involve additional activities; the approach for these will need to be discussed with our Systems team at the time of booking an upgrade.

There is a first in, first served policy in booking these into our calendar and there is typically a two week lead time. Please note that school holidays are typically booked out 4 weeks in advance - we suggest booking early to avoid disappointment.

Migrations

If you are considering migrating to a new server, we strongly recommend utilising our expert Systems team’s services for installing and migrating Synergetic servers. Please contact us via Service Desk to request assistance with your migration.

We have often received urgent requests from clients who have attempted to perform their own migration and encountered unforeseen installation/backup issues; despite our best efforts to assist without advance notice, a resolution may not always be achievable within an acceptable timeframe.

Please be aware there is typically a two week lead time for installations such as new servers and migrations, although times of higher demand can see longer lead times.  We suggest arranging your booking as early as possible to provide best chance of securing your preferred timing.

Supported Versions

With the release of v69, the v67 release moves out of mainstream support and all clients should already have migration plans in place to move from an earlier version to either v68 or v69.

We are providing a grace period for v67 version support until January 31st 2019, to allow surety of ongoing support for clients who have had upgrade scheduling difficulties.

As v68 (and v67) have moved out from mainstream support, ongoing defect fixes/hot fixes will only be available in v69 with the exception of critical/blocking issues (as and if reported). 

Development support
	v67	v68	v69
Supported Status	Until 31st January 2019
Bug Fixes	Severity 1 (Blocker) Severity 2 (Critical)	Severity 1 (Blocker) Severity 2 (Critical)	Addressed in severity/priority order
Government/Legislative Requirements
New Features and Improvements

We encourage you to make contact with our systems team for queries regarding upgrading; our consulting team can also be engaged to provide services relating to change management planning.

Windows Server

Supported configurations
	v67	v68	v69	v70	Notes
Windows Server 2008 / 2008R2					Microsoft mainstream support ended January 2015
Windows Server 2012 (64-bit)					Microsoft mainstream support ends October 2018
Windows Server 2012R2 (64-bit)					Microsoft mainstream support ends October 2018
Windows Server 2016 (64-bit)					Recommended version

SQL Server

Supported configurations
	v67	v68	v69	v70	Notes
SQL Server 2012					Microsoft mainstream support ended July 2017.
SQL Server 2014				TBC	Microsoft mainstream support ends July 2019
SQL Server 2016					Recommended version
SQL Server 2017					Not yet tested/approved for Synergetic products

Synergetic follows Microsoft mainstream support for SQL Server.

Synergetic v69 has retained compatibility for SQL Server 2012 as part of ensuring Australian Payroll-using clients' transition to using STP is as low-impact as possible; it is however highly recommended to migrate to later version as soon as practicable as this version of SQL Server is already out of mainstream support.

Microsoft SQL Links:

• SQL Server support lifecycle
• How to obtain the latest service pack for SQL Server 2012
• How to obtain the latest service pack for SQL Server 2014
• How to obtain the latest service pack for SQL Server 2016
• How you can determine the current service pack level
• Unofficial Microsoft SQL Server version list

ServiceDesk

We have been using ServiceDesk for over a year now, with all client support requests being lodged through the Synergetic ServiceDesk portal.

Some key points to be keep in mind for using ServiceDesk:

• Your username to ServiceDesk is your email address. Please use your email address when logging in or if you need to reset your password.
• All support tickets need to be raised via ServiceDesk at https://jira.synergetic.net.au/servicedesk.
• A list of common Service Desk Q & A’s.
• Our support desk phone number is unchanged:  +61 (3) 9803 8111 will continue operating per standard support hours and you may raise tickets via calling as previously; however with the additional information available online this may be faster and easier for you – especially to provide screen shots and other relevant information that helps us to understand and resolve your queries as efficiently as possible.

Synergetic User Hub

Documentation for Synergetic feature releases and functionality changes is available via our Synergetic User Hub.

The site is your continually growing resource for product documentation, knowledge base (KB) articles, troubleshooting guides, company details and other information.

The ‘Search’ box on the home page will search across the entire user hub, whereas if you execute a search within the page of a certain product/module, it will only search within that specific area. For example if you search for ‘Email’ on the home page, it will look for all articles across the entire user hub containing the word ‘Email', whereas a search for ‘Email’ on the Payroll documentation space will only search within that space. 

If you need to find any information, we would like to encourage users to start off by searching within the User Hub. This will also be useful for support related enquiries where an existing KB or troubleshooting article might give you the relevant information required to solve an error or an issue.

The Synergetic User Hub is also linked to ServiceDesk and it will prompt you with related articles when you are creating a new ServiceDesk ticket, as the answer you need may already be available.

Synergetic Known Defect List

We continue to publish details of known and confirmed product issues and defects - Synergetic Defect List.

There are different filter options available on the page which will allow you to do specific searches for items within products or modules, by Issue key (DSY-####), legacy enhancement reference, affected version, created date etc.

The list is dynamically populated from our development issue tracking system, and will show the status of issues in real time.

Synergetic Community (Discourse)

Synergetic are excited to be engaging with our clients through a community engagement platform called Discourse.  We currently have approximately 700 users registered; registration is open to any staff at your organisation - please note registrations must be made using the email domain for your organisation.

We encourage Synergetic users to register and visit this site regularly to engage in discussion with other users regarding existing and desired product functionality; see sneak peeks of upcoming Synergetic developments and more.

Users are able to vote to support new feature ideas that other users have suggested, with Synergetic taking this into account with our planning for future changes.

• The number of active votes increases as users gain reputation - as you increasingly use the site and interact with others, your user rating increases which provides you more votes for desired features.
• If the topic is closed or archived, the registered votes are released to the users and can be applied to other topics (but the vote count on the topic remains).
• If a topic is re-opened or unarchived, the votes are reclaimed and applied back to the users active vote count.
• If a topic reclaims the votes of a user and they go over their limit, they simply need to wait until topics are closed or archived to allow them to vote again.