As many of you may have learned over the past month, Joe Fantuzzi recently stepped down as Workshare’s CEO. Our board of directors asked me to assume his responsibilities until a permanent replacement has been named, and I am happy to fulfill that request.
I’ve been the services executive at Workshare for over four years which afforded me a unique perspective on your business challenges. Throughout that time, Workshare software has evolved from metadata and document comparison products to the current risk-mitigation solutions that offer document control and content protection. I am keenly aware that our evolution has at times been laborious and challenging for our valued clients and partners.
This communiqué details several actions that I’ve taken over the past month to improve software quality and your interactions with Workshare. I can assure you that these actions are being supported by our worldwide employee base and our board of directors to improve our ability to serve your needs:
- Fewer releases, higher quality. We have honed our development lifecycle to achieve this result, therefore you may expect fewer releases per year from Workshare and better results with the ones we do offer.
- One product team moving forward. In order to build out new Workshare Protect functionality for our content protection suite, the development team was previously divided into two market units. Now that our Protect components are feature complete and have been integrated into Workshare Professional, the market units have been merged back into one team with a singular focus…Quality! The team is 100% dedicated to delivering a compelling Workshare Professional 5.2 SR1 release next quarter.
- Incremental Quality Assurance (QA) resources and new management chain. In addition to added resources, QA has been moved underneath the Customer Support chain of command. While this offers more independence from engineering release pressures, it also moves the testing effort closer to real customer issues being experienced in real customer environments.
- New VP of Engineering. A seasoned veteran and senior engineering executive, Tim Carmichael, recently joined Workshare in the London office to lead development efforts of our client-side solutions. We welcome the proven software lifecycle discipline and rigor that he adds to our existing process.
- Easier phone access to Sales and Support teams. I’ve authorized a project to upgrade our global phone systems and make it much easier for you to reach the right sales and service people when you need them. This upgrade will be completed by year end.
- Increased level of cooperation with technology partners to test interoperability of our respective products and versions. We are working together with partners like Microsoft, InterWoven, OpenText, Worldox, StarLaw, Oracle, K2, LexisNexis, Aderant, Symantec and others to ensure our releases are well tested together before our clients do their own testing.
We’ve worked hard to build strategic solutions for our customers. We trust that these actions, along with many more going on in the background, will boost our ability to serve as a strategic vendor of choice for you moving forward.
As we close on the first quarter of our fiscal year, be assured that Workshare continues to grow and thrive as a business. We’re proud to have been recognized in the recent three analyst reports (Forrester, Gartner and Bloor Research) that all position Workshare squarely within the data leak prevention (DLP) and risk mitigation competitive landscape.
That said, we have not and will not abandon our position as the world’s leading document comparison engine. It remains a cornerstone of our risk mitigation suite of solutions.
In closing, we will continue to manage our growth, refine our operations and improve upon our business…in order to best meet your needs.
On behalf of the worldwide Workshare team, thank you for your patronage and loyalty.
Please feel free to post a comment below or contact me directly with any questions or concerns.
Sincerely,
Chris Doell
CEO