Speaking at the company's Synergy conference this week, Baron repeatedly referenced Apple's understanding of ease of use as he discussed his company's design goals. As demonstrated at the conference, the new design features far less text and more white space on web pages.
"The product we are building is the image your clients will have of you," says Baron, who described the design as "clean and simple".
While the CS Professional software line has elements that are termed SaaS, those are hosted products that are sold via subscription. The new line, which starts appearing next year, is a true cloud offering. Thomson will move towards the new platform through document management and client-facing products.
Baron also reported the cloud products, GoSystem and GoFileRoom, will have a new look and feel, but provided no details.
The new line will include a myTax Center the place where clients can upload documents and which accounting and tax professionals can access. Company executives noted that the company is moving away from the term "portal" to describe web-based storage sites.
Other design comments include the increasingly common responsive design in which Internet content has a similar look across computing devices and users can pick up tasks where they left off as they move from device to device.
