Every year our client forum gets bigger and better and this year was no exception; the 2015 London Forum was definitely the best one yet. We welcomed over 100 clients to the Oxo2 in the OXO Tower, to listen to some inspirational talks, network with like-minded IT professionals and hear what’s coming up for HighQ in the near future. We had a fantastic time meeting our clients, answering their questions and receiving excellent feedback from those who attended.
Our CSO Stuart Barr gave a talk detailing HighQ’s progress over the last year and spoke about the forthcoming release of HighQ Collaborate 4.0, as well as talking about the new features implemented by Publisher 4 and what’s to come in the 4.x series. This blog post provides a summary of what Stuart spoke about if you were unable to attend the event, and a reminder for those who did.
Review of the last year
Since the 2014 London Forum, HighQ has continued to grow rapidly, both in revenue and people. We have 190 enterprise clients worldwide, with over 40,000 organisations now using our systems; we are proud that 98% of the FTSE 100 now use HighQ through our clients.
HighQ and our products are best known within the legal sector but we are certainly not confined to this. Our products are great for law firms but it’s not just law firms that can use them. Stuart explained how clients of our clients get exposed to HighQ’s technology and want to use the systems themselves; over the past year we’ve found our expansion is due partly to corporate legal departments adopting our technologies.
We continue to improve and update our three products: HighQ Collaborate, HighQ Publisher and HighQ Dataroom year on year, and they continue to cover a wide range of use cases; we are known best as an extranet vendor but other main use cases include transaction management, internal collaboration, business process, personal productivity, client engagement and client services.
HighQ Dataroom
Our virtual data room platform HighQ Dataroom continues to grow, offering our clients market leading user experience and security on complex transactions. Since last year’s forum, our revenues and clients for Dataroom have continued to grow, gaining clients including leading FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 companies. We now have 24/7 project management for Dataroom and a site can be created whenever it’s needed; its flexibility and ease of use has made it a leading provider of data rooms for the legal sector. For existing Collaborate clients, Dataroom is worth considering for large deals or transactions. It helps to control short-term data spikes from heavy use of Collaborate, which could significantly increase the cost of a Collaborate instance, and provides an easy way for in-house administrators to offload the project management and administration of a complex data room to HighQ.
HighQ Publisher
Our digital publishing and content marketing platform, HighQ Publisher, had a complete revamp last year. Taking inspiration from the best content consumption and publishing platforms for consumers, the Publisher team have worked hard to set a new standard for enterprise content management with Publisher 4. The latest version provides a beautiful new user experience, responsive design for full mobile device support and hundreds of new features to provide a stunning, personalised content management and consumption experience. The new release enables organisations to create personalised dashboards and targeted content channels; manage publications, blogs and microsites; host and stream video; organise and manage corporate events; construct dynamic comparison toolkits; manage digital marketing campaigns and much, much more.
Now, the team have been working hard to improve Publisher even further with the 4.x series which sees some of the following changes: Metadata permissioning allows you to give users access to specific areas of content based on which areas of taxonomy it had been tagged with; better integration with social media sites means clients can share things on social media directly from Publisher; mega menus have been implemented and there is now customisable top level navigation; contact cards give mini-previews of people profiles.
Publisher roadmap
So what’s coming up for Publisher? We are looking to integrate our two products, HighQ Publisher and HighQ Collaborate, so that they can be deployed as a seamless solution for internal or external audiences. We want to provide rich visualisation of reporting and audit data so you can get an insight into what your clients are doing and what they are interested in. We will give our campaign module a facelift and offer the capability to combine several aspects of the platform together; for example, you will be able to create a campaign for an event that combines a tailored microsite, multiple email campaigns, custom content and videos into one integrated digital campaign. We want to improve marketing automation on Publisher and continue to implement new APIs.
Shortly we will be launching our brand new website, and Publisher will host our new blog. Our new website will be populated with a lot of useful information and resources for existing clients on our resources page such as case studies. We are delighted that our new blog has been built in HighQ Publisher; as Stuart said: “We are using our own system, we are drinking our own champagne”.
HighQ Collaborate
Collaborate is our flagship product and it continues to provide our clients with everything they need on one platform. HighQ Collaborate takes the services offered by all our competitors and puts them into one system, making it a team collaboration and project management platform, as well as a personal productivity and task management system.
Collaborate 3.4
Collaborate 3.4 was our biggest release yet and completed our 3.x vision that we first laid out two years ago. It implements major security enhancements and personal productivity and team collaboration features. This latest release incorporates two big security features: hybrid file storage and encryption key management. Hybrid file storage allows customers to choose where to store their files for each individual workspace within their instance of Collaborate. They have the option of storing files in any of HighQ’s five global data centres or on-premise within their own network. Collaborate 3.4 also gives customers the option to store separate encryption keys for each individual workspace on-premise. The keys are never permanently held in the cloud or managed by HighQ and it adds another layer of protection to their data. These two high-grade security features offer further flexibility and data sovereignty to our clients.
The latest version of Collaborate also adds additional productivity and collaboration features. HighQ Drive is our version of corporate Dropbox and allows users to have their personal work files stored in Collaborate synced to their PC or Mac; Microsoft Office integration makes it possible to seamlessly open and edit files stored in Collaborate in native Word, Excel and Powerpoint applications; our new team calendars include the option to switch between day, week, month and list views. Events can be added directly to the main calendar, colour-coded and categorised, and can be dragged and moved within the calendar.
Collaborate 4
Collaborate 4 will focus on three key areas: improving user experience (unifying not only the look and feel of the system but how it works), performance (making everything more responsive and faster) and integration (integration of Collaborate and Publisher and integration with third-party platforms). Collaborate 4 will see hundreds of new features and improvements to enhance performance and responsiveness. We will give it a unified design, consistent with Publisher 4; use space more efficiently to create a better user experience; incorporate modern HTML 5 features; provide support for multi-lingual user interface and provide integration and consistency with Publisher 4.
Collaborate roadmap
With Collaborate 4’s launch on the horizon, we are already planning the rest of the 4.x series. We believe that digital efficiency is key and want Collaborate to offer the capabilities that enable companies to be efficient both internally and externally. We will further explore the concept of matter workspaces and dashboards; as with Publisher, we want to provide rich visualisation of reporting and audit data; we want to improve process optimisation and workflow; we want to further improve our mobile performance and responsiveness and we want a deeper integration with other apps.
The future – our vision
As we continue the development of our platforms, we’ll look to add more enhancements as requested by our clients, which will change and evolve over time. Mainly, we will be working hard to consolidate and integrate HighQ Collaborate and HighQ Publisher, because together, we believe they will create powerful holistic solutions that will hugely assist internal and external collaboration. We want to continue to work to improve our clients efficiency and optimise their work processes, facilitate deeper client engagement and foster smarter working and communication.
If you are a client, you will be able to see videos from the form on the Client Community shortly, including recordings of Stuart’s talk. For more coverage of the HighQ Forum, London 2015, take a look at the forum in tweets and keep an eye on our blog!
