One of the big challenges in developing software is guiding your users on how to best use your software in a helpful and productive manner. We strongly believe that our customers should be well equipped to use our software and we like to provide them with as much help as possible.

Q4 Press is our newest product, it’s primary value proposition is to “Easily Collaborate on Regulated Documents”. Given that proposition we wanted to make sure that we made the software live by that rule. The welcome page is one of the things we implemented that we thought would bring that proposition to life.

Previous to introducing the welcome screen to Q4 Press, users that had just logged on would be presented with a list of all the press release that they were currently working on. It looked like this:

While this scenario worked fine while we were building the product, we soon realized that in real world scenarios this page would more often then not be blank for most of our users. This goes directly against our primary value proposition and we quickly began looking for ways to make this experience a much more inviting and informative one for our users.

This is where the Welcome screen came into play, it looks like this:

The welcome page’s primary goal is to drive new users to the most logical actions they should perform. In the case of Q4 Press, those actions are to invite other users to collaborate on a press release and to create a new press release.

Again we realized that this welcome screen is targeted at people that are new to using Q4 Press, and more advanced users would quickly tire of the fact that they have to land on this screen and then navigate away to work on the things that were important to them. This prompted us to include the ability for more advanced users to skip past the welcome screen (this is done via a check box on the welcome screen that the user ticks off, all subsequent logins will land them on the dashboard).

We think this feature is a great one and we hope you do to. If you would like to find out more about Q4 Press please email catherinec@q4websystems.com or call 416-789-7829 ext 225 and we will be more than happy to give you a demo of the product.

Below are the new features being pushed to your Q4 Press instance over the next few days – most you can see already. To learn more about what you can do with Press visit the Q4 Community.

Author “What’s Changed?”
Now Authors can quickly see what changes they have made and are able to compare their current version against all previous major versions.  

Minor Document Versions and Reverting
Authors are now able to track their own minor versions in the quick report. The Author can also now revert to any previous version of a press release quickly. 

Supervisor Role
Users can now be given Supervisor privileges which allow them to oversee all activity on all documents. This gives auditors and/or managers unrestricted to the Quick Report and sends notifications each time a press release is created. 

Secure and un-secure email alerts
Email alerts can now include messages in either a secure or unsecure format. If the message requires more security you can secure the alert so the message can only be viewed once inside Q4 Press. All email alerts also now include the senders name to help you prioritize alerts based on who they are coming from.  

Welcome Page
The new welcome page provides a friendly introduction for new users. It also includes a handy way for it to be dismissed (so you only see it once or twice). 

Easily Invite Users
Any existing user can now invite other people to collaborate on documents and create an account of their own.  When inviting a new user you can also add a custom message to make it more personable.

Joining Multiple Instances
You can now be a part of multiple instances in Press. This is very useful if you work with more than one company on their press releases and other regulatory documents.

Floating Comment Window
Adding comments is now easier thanks to a floating comment window. You can now move the comment input box around and the background is not obstructed by the grey screen.

Exporting to HTML
All documents can now be exported in HTML along with Microsoft Word. 

Cancel and un-cancel Press Release from the Archives
This means that even though the press release is finished you can put the press release in the cancelled bucket so that it should never be published.  You can also now un-cancel the press release put it back into workflow.

Have any suggestions for what you think the next feature of Q4 Press should be? Contact Us or leave a comment. Thanks!