Sometimes you have to change things that are perfectly good just to make them your own.
– Jack Donaghy, 30 Rock
Towards the end of the second quarter in 2010, we made a difficult decision to move forward and transition PRWeb to our host Vocus environment. At that point in time we knew that this decision would mean placing a temporary hold on new feature development while we focused our attention on ensuring a successful platform migration for an application that had been in development for nearly ten years.
Our decision to put new feature development on hold in the present was driven by our firm belief that our efforts would be doubly efficient after PRWeb was moved onto our host Vocus platform. Additionally, we knew there would be an opportunity to leverage tools built in other areas of the platform to make PRWeb even more powerful and useful to customers.
We are now on the brink of rolling out our new platform to customers and wanted to share some additional insight into what you should expect:
An overall experience that should be very familiar to you – The new PRWeb will be fundamentally similar to the PRWeb you have been using for years. It will help you create optimized news content, distribute it through the Web and access statistics on how it performed.
A faster and lighter experience – The new PRWeb performs faster. Additionally, you will see far less clutter. We have taken inventory of every feature on the old PRWeb, removed features that people didn’t use and emphasized features that people do use.
UX (user experience) optimization – Early in the process, we identified the “distribution configuration” screen as a page that could use some optimization. We have modified the controls on this page to make it as simple as possible for customers to target the distribution of their content.
Already, we’ve had some pretty solid feedback from our beta users on the new platform.
In addition to the immediate changes, here are some things you should expect from us once we have migrated over to the new platform:
Acceleration of feature enhancements – Over the past several quarters, the ideas have been piling up and our development team is chomping at the bit to build new features. We already have a couple killer feature enhancements that are nearing final stages of testing that will be rolled out on the new platform.
Greater connection with other Vocus products – One one of the most exciting benefits to the new PRWeb will come as a result of its shared platform with the best-in-class Vocus suite of products and the countless features and innovations that have been developed to serve the Vocus customer base. Already, we have begun to leverage some of the core Vocus technologies to power some of the new features that are currently in the lab.
Change can be a scary thing however we feel confident that the new platform is a big step forward for PRWeb. We will continue to provide you with updates as we begin to transition customers over to the new platform.
