by John Toepfer

I spent time at the Chicago Auto Show this weekend.  I enjoy getting a look at all the latest feats in automotive engineering; the new Corvette’s design, the economy of the plug-in Focus Eco, the luxury of the Jaguar XF.  Finding a billion dollars of R&D on display for close inspection under one roof is pretty close to heaven for me.  I also enjoy studying merchandising and marketing of cars.  There is enormous effort put into the presentations at this show and what we see tells us a lot about the manufacturers and the market.

As I wandered the rows of gleaming and carefully positioned vehicles, I couldn’t help but notice how many of those pristine polished paint jobs were besmirched by smudgy hand prints – sometimes in the oddest places too. (Timmy, did you have to smear your churro on that rocker panel?)

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November – 2012
Synthesis is pleased to announce the release of Synthesis Publisher™ v4.5.  This general system upgrade includes a wide variety of performance and capability improvements and will be applied to all hosted production instances over the next 30 days.  Notable new features and enhancements include:

• Improved component and document views supporting faster loads, improved filtering and added abilities to customize the views with active controls
• Improved navigation functions within the user interface
• Upgraded search features including improved natural language search
• Faster PDF rendering and reduced page load times
• New and improved text output templating
• Support for text comparisons in Internal Renditions
• Spilling text flows supporting in-line text and image references
• Linked PDFs with workflow indicative color coding
• PDF fillable form renderer
• Improved data loading speed for very large data files
• Improved bulk copy loading capabilities
• Upgraded security features

For more information on this release and new capabilities, contact your Synthesis relationship manager or [email protected].

March – 2012
Synthesis Synthesis Decks™ has been selected by The Hartford to provide principle content management services in support of their funds group web site.  The Synthesis/Merrill solution was chosen for this role in large part because this highly flexible technology was already in place at The Hartford to support various mutual fund sales and marketing literature production. This extension to a MerrillDPA implementation illustrates the extended value our approach to use-independent data aggregation and content management can provide to a client.  For more information contact us via:  [email protected].

September – 2011
The Synthesis Decks™ PreSales solution has been selected by a unit of JP Morgan Chase to support customizable compliance-controlled sales presentations for their network of 450 financial advisers.  Synthesis Decks was selected for this project based on the depth of product features and the completely customizable user experience it offers.  Synthesis Decks allows a field sales force to follow a structured and compliance-driven process to build pitch-specific sales kits via an easy to use web interface.  This opportunity was made possible by Synthesis’ long time collaboration with Merrill Communication.  For more information please contact us via: [email protected].

(Synthesis Decks – PreSales is also sold by Merrill Communication under the trade name slideLocker)