Q4 Blog

Congratulations to the Q4 PRESS iPod Winners!

Darrell Heaps — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:12:20 +0000

At the NIRI and CIRI annual conferences this year we had a promotion to give away a bunch of iPods for people who signed up for Q4 PRESS and responded using their BlackBerry. The promotion was a huge success and we had tons of people using Q4 PRESS on their BlackBerry for the first time. We heard from numerous people about how they enjoyed using PRESS and being part of such an innovative promotion.

Here is a list of the winners, we hope all of you enjoy many hours of great music on your iPod!

NIRI
Charles Ives - Hutchinson Technology Incorporated
Randy Mah - EPCOR Preferred Equity Inc.
Tim Thorp - ALLETE, Inc.
Amy Goldberg - Pitney Bowes Inc.
Ken Lockwood - Fluor Corporation
Bruce Macpherson - BB&T Corporation
Paul Vincent - Swift Energy Company
Amy Wakeham - Leap Wireless International, Inc.
Crystal Hacker - Leggett & Platt, Inc.

CIRI
John Vincic - BarnesMcInerney Inc.
Hazel Winchester - Agnico-Eagle Mines Ltd.
David Carey - ARC Energy Trust
Marie Fenez - Canadian Oil Sands Trust
Jamie Macintosh - Innovium Capital Corp.
Susanne Hickey - Magna International Inc.
Jessica Ruffen - Medical Ventures Corp.
Jeff Edwards - Canadian Pacific Railway Limited
Colin Petryk - Fording Canadian Coal Trust

Darrell’s Live Blog from CIRI 2008 on Zu Blog

Jason Little — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:39:52 +0000

If you weren’t able to attend CIRI 2008, you can catch up with Darrell’s live blog during the “Capital Markets Fraud Investigations - White Collar Crime” session which has been reposted on Zu Blog

Darrell Heaps, interviewed at NIRI 2008

Chris Jones — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:14:24 +0000

The folks over at zu.com were doing interviews with some of the vendors that were at NIRI this year. They just posted a video on their blog that contains an interview with Darrell Heaps. Darrell gives a quick overview of the company and a short demo of Q4 Press. There is a great reference to Darrell’s twitter activity and the FriendFeed room that Dominic Jones setup for the conference.

Go check the video out at the zu.com blog

Follow Q4 at NIRI 2008 on Twitter!

Jason Little — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:07:42 +0000

If you weren’t able to make it to NIRI 2008, or if you’re there wanting to keep tabs on what is up with Q4, you can get updates from Darrell on Twitter. http://twitter.com/darrellheaps

You can also subscribe to updates using this ATOM feed. Stay tuned, more to come from NIRI ‘08!

Arriving at NIRI

Darrell Heaps — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:33:31 +0000

We arrived yesterday and spent some time setting up the booth. Everything went super smooth this year. No problems with the booth or AV. We were all pretty beat from travelling and setting things up so we called it an early night. Today Catherine and I had great day golfing at Steele Canyon. Met a bunch of people and enjoyed playing through the desert, although some of the holes were just nuts! Here’s one of them:

For more photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dheaps/tags/niri/

C.A. Bancorp Inc. (TSX: BKP) Goes Live on Q4 WEB

Jason Little — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:07:47 +0000

C.A. Bancorp Inc (TSX: BKP) recently went live on Q4 Web Systems Q4 WEB platform. C.A. Bancorp is an alternative asset manager that directly invests in and manages private equity investments and other alternative assets with strong growth prospects.

We are very please to have C.A. Bancorp as part of our Q4 family and this marks the 7th client launch this year. This is a very exciting time for Q4, we have 4 more client launches coming up and recently launched Q4 PRESS for Blackberry.

Q4 PRESS for Blackberry

Jason Little — Fri, 23 May 2008 16:22:02 +0000

We’re happy to announce the imminent release of Q4 PRESS for Blackberry. We’re in the final phase of BETA testing and are planning on releasing this by the end of the quarter.

Highlights include:

- Authors can view document changes from reviewers with ‘track changes’ type of markup that is similar to MS Word

- Reviewers can comment on documents and submit feedback

- Simplified view of the dashboard

The product folks showed me a demo of the new functionality at the end of our last sprint and it’s simply fantastic. More to follow on this and other mobile features and if you have any questions about this feature or Q4 PRESS, contact us.

SEC goes ahead with mandating XBRL

Darrell Heaps — Wed, 14 May 2008 16:27:27 +0000

During this morning’s Open Meeting the SEC said that it plans to require companies to file their financial results using XBRL. Under the proposed schedule, 500 of the largest public companies would begin filing their financial data in XBRL in early 2009.

Most of the remaining companies will have to comply within the following two years.

This implementation is based on the Advisory Committee on Financial Reporting recommendation made back in January.

How XBRL Works - Video

Darrell Heaps — Sun, 11 May 2008 21:06:09 +0000

A great introduction to XBRL by Charles Hoffman, CPA. This is apparently Charlie’s first attempt at video, and although a little slow it does a great job of explaining how XBRL works.

Q4 Press - The Welcome Page

Chris Jones — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:16:49 +0000

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.