A quick trip to Malaysia last week to hold a couple of workshops on PleaseAuthor and check that we are on track for delivery of ‘demoware’ at the end of March and official launch at the end of June. So far so good.
In preparation for our series of webinars introducing PleaseAuthor, I’ve been researching what people think of as the primary advantage of ‘structured authoring’ – also known as component-based authoring (popularized by DITA) – and concluded it’s a detailed argument primarily based around content reuse (saving a great deal of time by reusing information that has already been written) but also encapsulating document compliancy and quality issues such as standard document content and layout; formatting and style and greater consistency across documents; and reduced training for authors.
In fact these arguments are all valid but very ‘soft’ and I’ve yet to find any of the hard ‘business case’ evidence for which is what I was searching. If anyone can point me at any publically available information I’d be grateful!
I understand the theoretical benefits and will be very interested to discuss the real world issues with prospective clients. Our first client presentation is next Monday followed by a planned series of webinars. We will also be presenting PleaseAuthor at several conferences over the next couple of months. I’m looking forward to the feedback and discussion.
I’ll be adding my thoughts to this blog as we go through the discussion process and evolve our thinking and messages. I’m looking forward to the Johnson & Johnson case study on 'Implementing Structured Authoring' at the ShareFest conference in April.
Interestingly, one of the more difficult aspects from our perspective in building a software product such as PleaseAuthor, is defining terms. This is never easy. There are only so many words in the English language and most of them are over used. For example, in PleaseReview we have the user type ‘Contributor’. We have since discovered that other software companies (partners of ours) also use the term ‘Contributors’. Thus clients have to work out how our Contributor differs from their Contributor! We are actually thinking of moving to ‘levels’ of user type rather than names as otherwise we are likely to end up with a PleaseAuthor Author and a PleaseReview Author as two separate roles. Should we rename one to a PleaseAuthor Creator? You can see the problem...
Meanwhile PleaseReview continues to be at the forefront of our minds and I’m working on the ‘enhancements proposition’ for the next major release. One thing's for sure, there is never a dull moment!
This blog started life with the intention to provide some insight into the thinking and activity that goes on behind the scenes in a software products company such as PleaseTech. As of January 2012 it will continue to provide that background on a quarterly basis but I’m intending to blog on PleaseReview, document review, document co-authoring, collaboration and other stuff in our environment. It remains a personal view and provides my personal opinions and thoughts.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Monday, January 30, 2012
Today we announce our new product, PleaseAuthor™
Today we announce our new product, PleaseAuthor™, designed to vastly improve the creation of documents by delivering component-based structured authoring for content re-use along DITA principles. For more information on DITA visit the DITA page on Wikipedia.
Obviously, as it’s PleaseTech, it will be based around Microsoft Word!
The PleaseAuthor output will be a Word document which itself is based on other Word documents. Thus a template document will define the content - some or all of which may be other Word documents.
We are aware that there are multiple products on the market already which offer DITA compliance and structured authoring. The above referenced article mentions a few. So, no doubt you’ll be asking ‘What does PleaseAuthor bring to the Party’?
The answer, we believe, is the emphasis on Microsoft Word. PleaseAuthor will bring content reuse to our normal, everyday Word experience. The objective is not to create a rigid DITA product but to use DITA principles to facilitate this.
The use of Word is absolutely key as this means PleaseAuthor will be extremely easy to access, learn and use. Clients will not have to invest in significant user training nor will they have to roll out XML-based client solutions, both of which, in my opinion, currently prevent adoption. PleaseAuthor is server based and accessed through the browser and with no client component whatsoever. Thus roll-out is controlled, quick and easy.
So, from a user perspective, all the user does is load a Word document into PleaseAuthor, open the document in PleaseAuthor (in the browser), point & click to create zones and specify which content goes in which zone. Nice and simple. The content (i.e. other Word documents) may be stored in PleaseAuthor or may be referenced to integrated document management systems.
I personally believe that a critical success factor in PleaseAuthor is the fact that it will be simple to use and that the ‘average Word user’ will be able to be productive without any significant training.
Additionally, the seamless integration with PleaseReview will make for a great experience for PleaseReview users. Whilst PleaseAuthor is a separate product and available independently, the integration with PleaseReview makes for some compelling opportunities to streamline the document production processes and reduce costs by making document creation and review quicker and easier.
For example, a zone of the new document populated with pre-approved content may be designated as a 'read only' ReviewZone in the subsequent review of the document which could be started automatically following its compilation.
Alternatively, a zone in a compiled document may be designated as an EditZone as the content may be customizable boilerplate and so available for editing.
Another key aspect is reporting and traceability. As with PleaseReview which provides a full audit trail of all comments and changes, PleaseAuthor will also provide inbuilt reporting. Reporting on ‘what content has been used where’ will deliver significant benefits, not least of which is the facilitation of impact analysis.
As PleaseAuthor is further developed, we see that the ability to report on different ‘types’ of component content will enable organizations to monitor consistency along the same types of information.
Thus there will be a seamless link providing a very powerful, controlled and audited authoring and review environment based around Microsoft Word.
So, in summary ……….
The PleaseAuthor approach is based exclusively on Word and the constructs which PleaseTech has been using in PleaseReview, specifically Word ‘Zones’. This avoids having to introduce users to new tools (especially complex XML authoring tools) and provides them with a familiar environment.
The basic principle is that the ‘compiled document’ is composed entirely or partially from content fragments which themselves are Word documents. The content fragment documents may be any size from a single word to several pages complete with structure (i.e. heading levels, etc.), layout and other Word attributes.
If integrated with document management systems, the content fragments can be controlled content each with its own create/review/approve lifecycle and associated attributes.
Where a document management system supports virtual or compound documents, we expect future releases of PleaseAuthor to support the ‘roll up’ of compound documents. Thus it will be possible for the content fragments themselves to be created from further content fragments. Thus it will be possible to maintain at the top of the branch the ‘rolled up’ content which is maintained in the tree beneath it.
We expect to release PleaseAuthor in June this year. To learn more, join one of our webinars next month - details will be available later this week.
Obviously, as it’s PleaseTech, it will be based around Microsoft Word!
The PleaseAuthor output will be a Word document which itself is based on other Word documents. Thus a template document will define the content - some or all of which may be other Word documents.
We are aware that there are multiple products on the market already which offer DITA compliance and structured authoring. The above referenced article mentions a few. So, no doubt you’ll be asking ‘What does PleaseAuthor bring to the Party’?
The answer, we believe, is the emphasis on Microsoft Word. PleaseAuthor will bring content reuse to our normal, everyday Word experience. The objective is not to create a rigid DITA product but to use DITA principles to facilitate this.
The use of Word is absolutely key as this means PleaseAuthor will be extremely easy to access, learn and use. Clients will not have to invest in significant user training nor will they have to roll out XML-based client solutions, both of which, in my opinion, currently prevent adoption. PleaseAuthor is server based and accessed through the browser and with no client component whatsoever. Thus roll-out is controlled, quick and easy.
So, from a user perspective, all the user does is load a Word document into PleaseAuthor, open the document in PleaseAuthor (in the browser), point & click to create zones and specify which content goes in which zone. Nice and simple. The content (i.e. other Word documents) may be stored in PleaseAuthor or may be referenced to integrated document management systems.
I personally believe that a critical success factor in PleaseAuthor is the fact that it will be simple to use and that the ‘average Word user’ will be able to be productive without any significant training.
Additionally, the seamless integration with PleaseReview will make for a great experience for PleaseReview users. Whilst PleaseAuthor is a separate product and available independently, the integration with PleaseReview makes for some compelling opportunities to streamline the document production processes and reduce costs by making document creation and review quicker and easier.
For example, a zone of the new document populated with pre-approved content may be designated as a 'read only' ReviewZone in the subsequent review of the document which could be started automatically following its compilation.
Alternatively, a zone in a compiled document may be designated as an EditZone as the content may be customizable boilerplate and so available for editing.
Another key aspect is reporting and traceability. As with PleaseReview which provides a full audit trail of all comments and changes, PleaseAuthor will also provide inbuilt reporting. Reporting on ‘what content has been used where’ will deliver significant benefits, not least of which is the facilitation of impact analysis.
As PleaseAuthor is further developed, we see that the ability to report on different ‘types’ of component content will enable organizations to monitor consistency along the same types of information.
Thus there will be a seamless link providing a very powerful, controlled and audited authoring and review environment based around Microsoft Word.
So, in summary ……….
The PleaseAuthor approach is based exclusively on Word and the constructs which PleaseTech has been using in PleaseReview, specifically Word ‘Zones’. This avoids having to introduce users to new tools (especially complex XML authoring tools) and provides them with a familiar environment.
The basic principle is that the ‘compiled document’ is composed entirely or partially from content fragments which themselves are Word documents. The content fragment documents may be any size from a single word to several pages complete with structure (i.e. heading levels, etc.), layout and other Word attributes.
If integrated with document management systems, the content fragments can be controlled content each with its own create/review/approve lifecycle and associated attributes.
Where a document management system supports virtual or compound documents, we expect future releases of PleaseAuthor to support the ‘roll up’ of compound documents. Thus it will be possible for the content fragments themselves to be created from further content fragments. Thus it will be possible to maintain at the top of the branch the ‘rolled up’ content which is maintained in the tree beneath it.
We expect to release PleaseAuthor in June this year. To learn more, join one of our webinars next month - details will be available later this week.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
We are having a crack at social marketing
Last year we looked at our marketing mix and, having spoken to a couple of consultants, identified that we needed to get involved in social marketing. What fun – or not!
I’m afraid the cynic in me was asking the question ‘what is the point of Twitter and Facebook?’! I’d used Twitter as a convenient means of updating relatives, friends and supporters when climbing Kilimanjaro (send a text and the tweet appears), but I just couldn’t see how its immediacy was relevant to our business. I mean, it’s not like we can tweet great contract wins – almost every deal we get has a ‘no publicity’ clause.
I’ve stayed away from Facebook although my wife has a profile and she is friends with certain people on my behalf. This does, by the way, make for interesting friends' requests!
Now, LinkedIn I understood – or thought I did. I’ve been a member since 2003 and have built up a list of connections following best practice (i.e. not accepting all link requests) and thought of it as a useful business contacts directory. Also we use its groups facility to run the PleaseReview user group.
However, when you begin to understand the totality of the conversation with the market it soon became apparent that it does have something to offer. The combination of blogs (this update is part of social marketing), Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is social marketing but it also has an effect on search engine results and positioning. For example, LinkedIn is another opportunity to promote the business as LinkedIn’s content is indexed by Google. So you may have noticed that my profile has changed a lot over the last few days and there is more to come! Twitter is indexed by Bing.
So, thanks to Carina (@birtie) and Mary (@concisetraining) I am now reformed and, as we all know, there is nothing so virtuous as a reformed ‘individual’. I'm even becomming something of a Hootsuite (@hootsuite) whizz! Feel free to follow me (@CornwellDavid).
Obviously it’s critical that you establish an objective. I’ll tell you that one of my objectives is to continuously promote the key words “document review”, “co-authoring”, “document collaboration” and so on – see how I’ve slipped them in – so that ultimately I establish myself as an authority on these topics.
So, my aim is now to blog weekly. I shall continue to provide some insight to PleaseTech on a quarterly basis, but the new social media campaign demands that I blog more often (Google likes blogs and especially those which are active I’m told) on my pet subjects, namely: document review, co-authoring and document collaboration!
I’m afraid the cynic in me was asking the question ‘what is the point of Twitter and Facebook?’! I’d used Twitter as a convenient means of updating relatives, friends and supporters when climbing Kilimanjaro (send a text and the tweet appears), but I just couldn’t see how its immediacy was relevant to our business. I mean, it’s not like we can tweet great contract wins – almost every deal we get has a ‘no publicity’ clause.
I’ve stayed away from Facebook although my wife has a profile and she is friends with certain people on my behalf. This does, by the way, make for interesting friends' requests!
Now, LinkedIn I understood – or thought I did. I’ve been a member since 2003 and have built up a list of connections following best practice (i.e. not accepting all link requests) and thought of it as a useful business contacts directory. Also we use its groups facility to run the PleaseReview user group.
However, when you begin to understand the totality of the conversation with the market it soon became apparent that it does have something to offer. The combination of blogs (this update is part of social marketing), Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is social marketing but it also has an effect on search engine results and positioning. For example, LinkedIn is another opportunity to promote the business as LinkedIn’s content is indexed by Google. So you may have noticed that my profile has changed a lot over the last few days and there is more to come! Twitter is indexed by Bing.
So, thanks to Carina (@birtie) and Mary (@concisetraining) I am now reformed and, as we all know, there is nothing so virtuous as a reformed ‘individual’. I'm even becomming something of a Hootsuite (@hootsuite) whizz! Feel free to follow me (@CornwellDavid).
Obviously it’s critical that you establish an objective. I’ll tell you that one of my objectives is to continuously promote the key words “document review”, “co-authoring”, “document collaboration” and so on – see how I’ve slipped them in – so that ultimately I establish myself as an authority on these topics.
So, my aim is now to blog weekly. I shall continue to provide some insight to PleaseTech on a quarterly basis, but the new social media campaign demands that I blog more often (Google likes blogs and especially those which are active I’m told) on my pet subjects, namely: document review, co-authoring and document collaboration!
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Another successful year, new plans and more marketing
Last year in my January blog post I said “In many ways the January blog is getting quite repetitive.” And so they are. It’s yet another successful year – thankfully! We continue to work hard and focus on what we do and it seems to be working.
In 2011 we exhibited 37% revenue growth over 2010. Not too shabby. We remain profitable and retain a large cash balance which is still running at approximately 12 months of projected overheads. Given that we have taken on more staff this year and are still recruiting (thus increasing the projected overheads) this is an excellent position.
Revenue in 2011 was split approximately 1/3rd annual renewable (such as support and hosting, etc.), 1/3rd new business from existing clients and 1/3rd new business from new clients – a total of 21 new corporate clients during 2011. I believe that this is a healthy balance and am always particularly pleased with the new business from existing clients as it shows that PleaseReview delivers the benefits it promised!
The trend of Life Sciences being our largest sector continues with 66% of 2011 sales in that sector. Defense comes in a strong second position accounting for 24% of sales. Once again North America is our largest market accounting for 79% of all 2011 sales.
From a sales perspective, the main difference between 2011 and 2010 was that the sales were much more evenly spread out. In my Q2 blog post last year I note that “Talking of the sales side of the equation, I’ve given up trying to forecast the flow of sales ....To the end of Q2 this year our sales were 60% ahead of June 2010.” This spread of sales was continued throughout the year and by the time December came around, we had already met and exceeded our targets – happy days!
The other good news for 2011 was that we expanded our development team with excellent calibre people. As a result, development surged ahead and we were able to finally release PleaseReview 4.2 in mid-October. Only a couple of weeks later than planned. Version 4.2 includes the review of Excel spread sheets, ReviewZones, Flexible EditZones, Review templates and many other enhancements.
So I think we can conclude that 2011 was a very good year for us!
What does 2012 hold?
Once again we go into the year with the economic outlook dire although there are glimpses of hope in the American economic figures. The year holds two very large and very interesting ‘situations’.
The first is the problems in the Eurozone and whether the Euro will survive in its current form. The second is the US presidential election.
With regard to the Eurozone: My only comment, other than finding the whole thing absolutely fascinating and believing that we are truly living in momentous times, is that, clearly, the economic uncertainty is not good for anyone. As we deal with multinational companies most for which do business in the Eurozone, it will be interesting to see whether the uncertainty affects their investment plans. No-one could blame them for proceeding with caution.
The good news is that I have even less to say on the second issue – that of the US presidential elections. I do however hope that it provides plenty of material for our new document review cartoons website – more of that later.
So, back to our prospects for 2012. We are approaching 2012 as we have approached every recent year – with caution. However, we are planning to expand and are currently recruiting and have plans for further recruitment later in the year. We go into the year with a strong prospect list and great plans.
Over the next few weeks there will be a significant new product announcement. In fact we have already started development and are hoping to get this announcement out in January – watch this space! We also have a minor new product announcement, new partnerships and revitalized existing partnerships to look forward to. In addition we are recruiting for a business development manager to concentrate on the UK market.
Focus on the UK market is not a hard strategy to come up with. We want to do ‘more in Europe’ so do we (i) concentrate on our home market, or (ii) concentrate on, say, the German market which is not on our doorstep and where we don’t speak the language? We choose (i). That’s not to say we are ignoring other markets. We will happily work directly with clients and with partners. It’s just a question of proactive focus.
In terms of marketing it’s ‘same old’ with the exception that we have embarked on a social media marketing program. To that end you can expect more blogging from me and blogging on document review, document co-authoring and other relevant topics – rather than solely my quarterly update on business, which I have practiced thus far.
Furthermore I am now officially ‘tweeting’. You can follow me on @CornwellDavid – rather than what I had for breakfast or lunch, my aim is to tweet around the same subjects as I’ll be blogging about. I’m still trying to get a handle on the whole twitter thing – I think I understand the benefits, it’s just that it does seem to consume an awful lot of valuable time! Another key concern for the company is that my spelling is notoriously bad. Let loose on Twitter there is no telling what may happen. As a result Clare Beazley, our CFO, and Sarah Holden, our Marketing Manager, are both following me (closely) ready to undertake damage limitation!
One of our initiatives in the whole social media/marketing program is the new document review cartoon website. The objective is to post a new cartoon on average every two weeks. I just hope that there will be something other than the US presidential election and the Eurozone crisis to provide us with material, otherwise it will become very tedious. The other problem is, of course, that the cartoon has a global audience and therefore the subject matter must be broadly understood. Let’s see how it goes.
From the more traditional marketing perspective, we are already signed up to exhibit/attend 12 conferences this year and I’d expect to add another 3 – 4 conferences to that tally. All except one are in the USA. We are largely taking a break from European conferences this year.
And in other news ………
I’d like to congratulate Sue O’Connell on having been selected as an Olympic Torch carrier. Clients will know Sue as a key person in our client services, namely in training and support.
Sue has been and continues to be involved in multiple charitable works. She has completed many of the Playtex Moonwalks in London, Edinburgh and Bristol, raising thousands of pounds for Breakthrough Breast Cancer and has taken part in the London Marathon twice. She has also started working with SMASH youth project charity, which offers mentoring to disadvantaged teenagers in Swindon.
Sue will get to carry the Olympic Torch for about 300m – hardly long enough to break into a sweat. We are already coaching her on how to take small steps and suggesting that she doesn’t ‘race to the finish line’. And on the subject of finishing line Sue also won a place in the ballot for the Olympic Park Run where she gets to run around the perimeter of the Olympic Park, finishing across the actual finish line in the Olympic Stadium! I hope to post some photos in due course.
So, as we head into 2012 the one certainty we have is that nothing will go to plan. There will be ‘left field’ opportunities and threats and we will react to these as and when they appear. The economic outlook is dire but it has been for the last three years and we have continued to expand. We have a good set of prospects going into 2012 so I’m as confident as I dare be that the year will work out well for us.
In 2011 we exhibited 37% revenue growth over 2010. Not too shabby. We remain profitable and retain a large cash balance which is still running at approximately 12 months of projected overheads. Given that we have taken on more staff this year and are still recruiting (thus increasing the projected overheads) this is an excellent position.
Revenue in 2011 was split approximately 1/3rd annual renewable (such as support and hosting, etc.), 1/3rd new business from existing clients and 1/3rd new business from new clients – a total of 21 new corporate clients during 2011. I believe that this is a healthy balance and am always particularly pleased with the new business from existing clients as it shows that PleaseReview delivers the benefits it promised!
The trend of Life Sciences being our largest sector continues with 66% of 2011 sales in that sector. Defense comes in a strong second position accounting for 24% of sales. Once again North America is our largest market accounting for 79% of all 2011 sales.
From a sales perspective, the main difference between 2011 and 2010 was that the sales were much more evenly spread out. In my Q2 blog post last year I note that “Talking of the sales side of the equation, I’ve given up trying to forecast the flow of sales ....To the end of Q2 this year our sales were 60% ahead of June 2010.” This spread of sales was continued throughout the year and by the time December came around, we had already met and exceeded our targets – happy days!
The other good news for 2011 was that we expanded our development team with excellent calibre people. As a result, development surged ahead and we were able to finally release PleaseReview 4.2 in mid-October. Only a couple of weeks later than planned. Version 4.2 includes the review of Excel spread sheets, ReviewZones, Flexible EditZones, Review templates and many other enhancements.
So I think we can conclude that 2011 was a very good year for us!
What does 2012 hold?
Once again we go into the year with the economic outlook dire although there are glimpses of hope in the American economic figures. The year holds two very large and very interesting ‘situations’.
The first is the problems in the Eurozone and whether the Euro will survive in its current form. The second is the US presidential election.
With regard to the Eurozone: My only comment, other than finding the whole thing absolutely fascinating and believing that we are truly living in momentous times, is that, clearly, the economic uncertainty is not good for anyone. As we deal with multinational companies most for which do business in the Eurozone, it will be interesting to see whether the uncertainty affects their investment plans. No-one could blame them for proceeding with caution.
The good news is that I have even less to say on the second issue – that of the US presidential elections. I do however hope that it provides plenty of material for our new document review cartoons website – more of that later.
So, back to our prospects for 2012. We are approaching 2012 as we have approached every recent year – with caution. However, we are planning to expand and are currently recruiting and have plans for further recruitment later in the year. We go into the year with a strong prospect list and great plans.
Over the next few weeks there will be a significant new product announcement. In fact we have already started development and are hoping to get this announcement out in January – watch this space! We also have a minor new product announcement, new partnerships and revitalized existing partnerships to look forward to. In addition we are recruiting for a business development manager to concentrate on the UK market.
Focus on the UK market is not a hard strategy to come up with. We want to do ‘more in Europe’ so do we (i) concentrate on our home market, or (ii) concentrate on, say, the German market which is not on our doorstep and where we don’t speak the language? We choose (i). That’s not to say we are ignoring other markets. We will happily work directly with clients and with partners. It’s just a question of proactive focus.
In terms of marketing it’s ‘same old’ with the exception that we have embarked on a social media marketing program. To that end you can expect more blogging from me and blogging on document review, document co-authoring and other relevant topics – rather than solely my quarterly update on business, which I have practiced thus far.
Furthermore I am now officially ‘tweeting’. You can follow me on @CornwellDavid – rather than what I had for breakfast or lunch, my aim is to tweet around the same subjects as I’ll be blogging about. I’m still trying to get a handle on the whole twitter thing – I think I understand the benefits, it’s just that it does seem to consume an awful lot of valuable time! Another key concern for the company is that my spelling is notoriously bad. Let loose on Twitter there is no telling what may happen. As a result Clare Beazley, our CFO, and Sarah Holden, our Marketing Manager, are both following me (closely) ready to undertake damage limitation!
One of our initiatives in the whole social media/marketing program is the new document review cartoon website. The objective is to post a new cartoon on average every two weeks. I just hope that there will be something other than the US presidential election and the Eurozone crisis to provide us with material, otherwise it will become very tedious. The other problem is, of course, that the cartoon has a global audience and therefore the subject matter must be broadly understood. Let’s see how it goes.
From the more traditional marketing perspective, we are already signed up to exhibit/attend 12 conferences this year and I’d expect to add another 3 – 4 conferences to that tally. All except one are in the USA. We are largely taking a break from European conferences this year.
And in other news ………
I’d like to congratulate Sue O’Connell on having been selected as an Olympic Torch carrier. Clients will know Sue as a key person in our client services, namely in training and support.
Sue has been and continues to be involved in multiple charitable works. She has completed many of the Playtex Moonwalks in London, Edinburgh and Bristol, raising thousands of pounds for Breakthrough Breast Cancer and has taken part in the London Marathon twice. She has also started working with SMASH youth project charity, which offers mentoring to disadvantaged teenagers in Swindon.
Sue will get to carry the Olympic Torch for about 300m – hardly long enough to break into a sweat. We are already coaching her on how to take small steps and suggesting that she doesn’t ‘race to the finish line’. And on the subject of finishing line Sue also won a place in the ballot for the Olympic Park Run where she gets to run around the perimeter of the Olympic Park, finishing across the actual finish line in the Olympic Stadium! I hope to post some photos in due course.
So, as we head into 2012 the one certainty we have is that nothing will go to plan. There will be ‘left field’ opportunities and threats and we will react to these as and when they appear. The economic outlook is dire but it has been for the last three years and we have continued to expand. We have a good set of prospects going into 2012 so I’m as confident as I dare be that the year will work out well for us.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Document Review Cartoons
We get great feedback on our cartoons - everyone loves them. They have now taken on a life of their own and we have just launched a new website which takes a humorous view on events and stories that appear in the world media. We believe that if only the right document review tool had been used, then things may have turned out quite differently! Launched on Thanksgiving day with a Thanksgiving 1st cartoon! Enjoy!
http://www.documentreviewcartoons.com/
http://www.documentreviewcartoons.com/
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
If only they had used PleaseReview ....
(Click on the image to enlarge)
I'm a sad Englishman :-(
As I live in Wales I guess I'll have to support Wales now ;-).
For my American readers - this refers to England's weekend loss to France in the rugby world cup being held in New Zealand!
Thursday, August 04, 2011
Q2 - marketing challenges and technical progress
Once again I’m running behind on my blog entry. The yellow sticky note on my laptop has been saying ‘blog’ at me for the last 3 weeks. In my defence, the 1st two weeks of July were at the end of an intensive travel period during which, in 6 weeks, I was in Denver twice, Chicago, Malaysia and the Netherlands. So a week to recover and catch-up and that means I’m only running a week behind really!
So what has happened in Q2, 2011?
One of the key ‘learnings’ is that our opinion on exhibiting at European events has, unfortunately, been reinforced. A colleague attended an event recently where, despite there being plenty of delegates and the organizer adopting ‘best practice’ in having all the food and drinks in the exhibition area, not one – yes, I repeat - not one person showed any interest. As my colleague commented: “I’ve never known so many delegates and so little interest”. This certainly was not a case of inappropriate product fit as the same conference in the USA and the UK works for us.
I've personally have the same experience. It was the DIA European conference in Barcelona in 2008. There were about 2,500 delegates and as I note in my April 2008 blog entry “the booth traffic was simply non-existent. From talking with other vendors we were not the only ones suffering. I had one, yes, a single meaningful conversation (ie one which may ultimately move forward into an opportunity) over the full three days. So, it was a complete waste of money, time and just about everything.” It is mind-numbingly boring to be a vendor on a booth without traffic – so please remember that booth staff have feelings too ;-)
This continues to be a difficult topic – how to market effectively in Europe? Despite our previous experience, we are giving it one more shot. We will be attending the European SharePoint Conference in Berlin in October. If that is a miss then it’s going to be very, very difficult to persuade me that money in European non-UK conferences is money well spent.
We continue to try different conferences and European marketing strategies but I’m not sure we are yet seeing light at the end of the tunnel. Having said that, our European business is growing slowly but America continues to be the primary market.
Other events attended in Q2 were the APMP (Association of Proposal Management Professionals) in Denver and the DIA Annual Conference this year held in Chicago.
We have had some good traction in the proposals market and the APMP conference was a good learning experience. It just about washed its face in terms of opportunities but we learnt a lot about the market and will need to change some of our messaging. However, I remain hopeful that we will continue to gain customers in this sector.
The DIA conference was excellent (as always) and it’s a great opportunity to catch-up with partners (and meet up with new ones), clients, prospective clients and even garner a few new opportunities!
While we continue to market into the Life Sciences sector we are looking to address other sectors in a more direct manner. We currently have clients in multiple sectors including Defense, Utilities, Government, IT, Manufacturing, Financial Services, and others.
Other aspects of the marketing mix are going well. The new website has been well received and we have started collating customer case studies which give some excellent real life scenarios where PleaseReview has dramatically improved customers' business processes. The LinkedIn user group is gaining momentum and working well.
Likewise, at the moment sales are doing well and we are surging ahead but clearly, to maintain the momentum, we need an ever increasing number of opportunities. Ideally some in Europe!
Talking of the sales side of the equation, I’ve given up trying to forecast the flow of sales – I’m not sure it’s possible. If you read my blog entry in January, you’ll note that last year we benefitted from a Q4 last minute surge of orders which delivered 24% revenue growth for 2010. To the end of Q2 this year our sales were 60% ahead of June 2010. So, if the pattern repeats this could be a very, very good year.
So, conventional wisdom suggests that we invest in expansion. However, the economic outlook is unstable and the so called recovery appears to be stalling. At the time of writing the US has just secured the ‘debt deal’ and avoided default. No-one seems to know what effect this whole saga will have on the economy and companies’ investment plans. So, rather than invest heavily in growth, we are remaining cautious and seeing what the rest of the year brings.
From a technology perspective we are still trying to get the next PleaseReview release out and still targeting the end of Q3 2011. We have now doubled the technical team in Malaysia (a surge of excellent candidates when we changed the advertisement to include the remuneration figures – a lesson in that) and they are all fully trained, inducted and working on PleaseReview v4.2. It will be tight but, unless we hit unforeseen issues, I think we will make it. Most stuff is more-or-less working and we are working steadily to iron out the bugs. I’ve begun a series of v4.2 webinars for our clients and watched the demos become more solid on a week by week basis. So, no promises, but we are focused and stand a fighting chance.
One of the things we have been fighting is a new PDF plug-in. After a massive investment in both development and testing I have had to accept a cut back in the scope because we can’t get it stable. It will still add value but it’s disappointing that we can’t achieve the initial vision. This was to have been our last ever PDF plug-in development as I believe that Acrobat on the desktop is going to go away. Historically it has been a standard desktop application for our core market of Life Sciences. But, with the ability to save Microsoft Office documents as PDF built-in to the Office products and multiple free tools emerging for things such as signatures and form filling and the latest version of the free Adobe Reader supporting basic mark-up, I can’t see that companies are going to be able to justify the expense of ‘paid for’ Acrobat. Therefore I believe that ‘paid for’ Acrobat will become a specialist high-end tool. That makes it time for us to invest our PDF development dollars on other means of reviewing PDF documents.
However, a simple client requirement which we hadn’t come across/thought of previously has got us specifying an extension to the, as yet, unreleased new plug-in. So, whether we like it or not, the PDF plug-in is going to be around for a while yet!
Finally, an article in May caught my eye. A Gartner survey (reported on Silicon.com) has identified that the amount of time people are spending reading on a digital screen is now almost equal to time spent consuming printed paper text. Other pertinent findings are that tablet users have a better electronic reading experience than laptop users and that younger people are happier reading on screen than older people. I think I could have told them that last fact for free and we are certainly seeing more tablet use in the client base - but it’s nice to have it all confirmed.
What does this all mean? Well, two things really. Firstly, tablets are going to become important for document review and we are addressing that in v4.2; and secondly, it confirms that the future is electronic and as we lead the market in electronic document review that can only be good!
So what has happened in Q2, 2011?
One of the key ‘learnings’ is that our opinion on exhibiting at European events has, unfortunately, been reinforced. A colleague attended an event recently where, despite there being plenty of delegates and the organizer adopting ‘best practice’ in having all the food and drinks in the exhibition area, not one – yes, I repeat - not one person showed any interest. As my colleague commented: “I’ve never known so many delegates and so little interest”. This certainly was not a case of inappropriate product fit as the same conference in the USA and the UK works for us.
I've personally have the same experience. It was the DIA European conference in Barcelona in 2008. There were about 2,500 delegates and as I note in my April 2008 blog entry “the booth traffic was simply non-existent. From talking with other vendors we were not the only ones suffering. I had one, yes, a single meaningful conversation (ie one which may ultimately move forward into an opportunity) over the full three days. So, it was a complete waste of money, time and just about everything.” It is mind-numbingly boring to be a vendor on a booth without traffic – so please remember that booth staff have feelings too ;-)
This continues to be a difficult topic – how to market effectively in Europe? Despite our previous experience, we are giving it one more shot. We will be attending the European SharePoint Conference in Berlin in October. If that is a miss then it’s going to be very, very difficult to persuade me that money in European non-UK conferences is money well spent.
We continue to try different conferences and European marketing strategies but I’m not sure we are yet seeing light at the end of the tunnel. Having said that, our European business is growing slowly but America continues to be the primary market.
Other events attended in Q2 were the APMP (Association of Proposal Management Professionals) in Denver and the DIA Annual Conference this year held in Chicago.
We have had some good traction in the proposals market and the APMP conference was a good learning experience. It just about washed its face in terms of opportunities but we learnt a lot about the market and will need to change some of our messaging. However, I remain hopeful that we will continue to gain customers in this sector.
The DIA conference was excellent (as always) and it’s a great opportunity to catch-up with partners (and meet up with new ones), clients, prospective clients and even garner a few new opportunities!
While we continue to market into the Life Sciences sector we are looking to address other sectors in a more direct manner. We currently have clients in multiple sectors including Defense, Utilities, Government, IT, Manufacturing, Financial Services, and others.
Other aspects of the marketing mix are going well. The new website has been well received and we have started collating customer case studies which give some excellent real life scenarios where PleaseReview has dramatically improved customers' business processes. The LinkedIn user group is gaining momentum and working well.
Likewise, at the moment sales are doing well and we are surging ahead but clearly, to maintain the momentum, we need an ever increasing number of opportunities. Ideally some in Europe!
Talking of the sales side of the equation, I’ve given up trying to forecast the flow of sales – I’m not sure it’s possible. If you read my blog entry in January, you’ll note that last year we benefitted from a Q4 last minute surge of orders which delivered 24% revenue growth for 2010. To the end of Q2 this year our sales were 60% ahead of June 2010. So, if the pattern repeats this could be a very, very good year.
So, conventional wisdom suggests that we invest in expansion. However, the economic outlook is unstable and the so called recovery appears to be stalling. At the time of writing the US has just secured the ‘debt deal’ and avoided default. No-one seems to know what effect this whole saga will have on the economy and companies’ investment plans. So, rather than invest heavily in growth, we are remaining cautious and seeing what the rest of the year brings.
From a technology perspective we are still trying to get the next PleaseReview release out and still targeting the end of Q3 2011. We have now doubled the technical team in Malaysia (a surge of excellent candidates when we changed the advertisement to include the remuneration figures – a lesson in that) and they are all fully trained, inducted and working on PleaseReview v4.2. It will be tight but, unless we hit unforeseen issues, I think we will make it. Most stuff is more-or-less working and we are working steadily to iron out the bugs. I’ve begun a series of v4.2 webinars for our clients and watched the demos become more solid on a week by week basis. So, no promises, but we are focused and stand a fighting chance.
One of the things we have been fighting is a new PDF plug-in. After a massive investment in both development and testing I have had to accept a cut back in the scope because we can’t get it stable. It will still add value but it’s disappointing that we can’t achieve the initial vision. This was to have been our last ever PDF plug-in development as I believe that Acrobat on the desktop is going to go away. Historically it has been a standard desktop application for our core market of Life Sciences. But, with the ability to save Microsoft Office documents as PDF built-in to the Office products and multiple free tools emerging for things such as signatures and form filling and the latest version of the free Adobe Reader supporting basic mark-up, I can’t see that companies are going to be able to justify the expense of ‘paid for’ Acrobat. Therefore I believe that ‘paid for’ Acrobat will become a specialist high-end tool. That makes it time for us to invest our PDF development dollars on other means of reviewing PDF documents.
However, a simple client requirement which we hadn’t come across/thought of previously has got us specifying an extension to the, as yet, unreleased new plug-in. So, whether we like it or not, the PDF plug-in is going to be around for a while yet!
Finally, an article in May caught my eye. A Gartner survey (reported on Silicon.com) has identified that the amount of time people are spending reading on a digital screen is now almost equal to time spent consuming printed paper text. Other pertinent findings are that tablet users have a better electronic reading experience than laptop users and that younger people are happier reading on screen than older people. I think I could have told them that last fact for free and we are certainly seeing more tablet use in the client base - but it’s nice to have it all confirmed.
What does this all mean? Well, two things really. Firstly, tablets are going to become important for document review and we are addressing that in v4.2; and secondly, it confirms that the future is electronic and as we lead the market in electronic document review that can only be good!
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