As we approach the end of the year I wanted to offer you a quick update on Workshare's 2008 initiatives to improve product quality and your overall customer experience.
As outlined in my June blog entry, Workshare listened to your feedback and focused the balance of 2008 on a few key areas; namely:
- fewer and higher quality releases
- increased Quality Assurance (QA) resourcing and beta test cycles
- one product engineering team moving forward
- a new phone system
The engineering organizational changes were implemented in May and the phone systems upgrade is now complete. Our increased focus on high quality and relevant enhancements resulted in the following.
Workshare Professional 5.2 SR1 - Your Feedback Worked!
With input from over 400 customers, the September product release of SR1 featured significant performance, reliability and quality enhancements. After speaking with many customers over the past few months it's apparent the improvements in SR1 have had a positive effect on most of our customers across the globe. In short, your feedback worked and we thank you for it!
Workshare Professional 5.2 SR2 Beta
We are excited to see further improvements to product quality in the upcoming SR2 release. In fact, we have had the largest response to a beta program in Workshare history with over 500 customers interested in participating in the SR2 beta program. If for some reason you did not get an invitation, or hear about the SR2 beta, please do not hesitate to contact us to learn more.
The SR2 Product Release Has Customers Talking About PDF
As organizations look to streamline operations in the current economic environment we are hearing numerous comments about vendor consolidation and the excitement around the Workshare product suite to help save time and money. The greatly enhanced PDF features are probably the most talked about enhancements as you have been asking for these features for some time, and there are many hidden gems that will prove beneficial to our legal customers like combining and manipulating multiple PDF documents whilst maintaining the UI that your users are already quite familiar with.
Majority of DeltaView Users Now Use Professional
I am also happy to announce that the vast majority of Workshare DeltaView users have migrated to the Workshare Professional platform and our industry-leading comparison technology. If you are still using DeltaView, be sure to contact us to stay current on flexible migration options and special DeltaView customer pricing. In these uncertain economic times, our customers are finding that choosing the industry leader is reliable, safe and enables them to take advantage of the best product and support on the market at a low cost. These significant financial savings mean that Workshare is a very inexpensive solution when compared to some competitive products. Also, when looking at competitive solutions, do compare apples with apples. DeltaView is a 10 year old technology, so make your comparisons against Workshare Professional 5.2 SR1 as it is the latest and most compelling GA release.
With a renewed focus we have not only communicated more openly about quality and service improvements, we have produced more webinars to keep you informed and trained on the solutions. Most recently we had a Live Tour of Workshare Professional and a webinar on Future Workshare Product Enhancements to highlight upcoming SR2 features. In 2009 we will continue to invest in your success and I encourage you to leverage these educational webinars to get the most out of Workshare solutions.
2009 Outlook
With 11,000+ customers globally, many of you have asked about our plans beyond SR2 as you look to leverage our solutions beyond current capabilities. Stay tuned as the product plans for 2009 are exciting and continue Workshare's commitment to best of breed solutions for the legal community. If you would like to become more involved with our product design team or learn more about the plans for 2009, please don't hesitate to contact your account manager who will be more than happy to arrange a convenient time to go through this with you so that you can remain up to date with everything we're working on.
Your input is our most valued source of information in the product planning process. Please do not hesitate to contact us to provide input in product capabilities, priorities and partnerships you would like to see Workshare focus on.
Please don't hesitate to contact me directly with any questions or concerns.
Sincerely,
Chris Doell