For CCH, that means refinements to its year-old IntelliConnect, the research platform that replaced Tax Research Network. CCH has been seeking ways to make navigation and searching a lot easier. It's clear from user comments, especially the reaction of writers of legal blogs that there were problems and CCH has been churning out changes at a fast pace.
"We are putting a lot of intelligence into getting a more pertinent answer and different ways of categorizing your answer," says Tanya Rose, now product manager for the ProSystem fx Suite, but until recently a product manager with IntellConnect. That question will be issued a new release about December.
A June release was based on what Rose called the browser experience and finding related information. She notes that some users, particularly those who had used the older platform, wanted "to be able to menu walk down to an answer quickly." That release placed the browser tree on the home page. "It used to be one click away. Now, it's no clicks away," says Rose. That was a change particularly requested by large accounting firms and by law firms.
CheckPoint has been on the market a lot longer than IntelliConnect, but Thomson Reuters is also working on improvement to the user interface and navigation. However, it isn't moving towards a broad new platform in the way that CCH has.
"We are making some subtle but impactful changes, to the user interface and navigation to enable customers be more effective in finding what they are looking for and in being more efficient and effective in a research experience," says Jim Reeves, SVP for new product development development.
In January, Thomson introduced a natural language search, enabling users to conduct searches in plain English via questions, phrases or a series of words and which will produce the 100 best matches. That isn't the last change being contemplated for search.
"There will be further improvements in search coming. All this is based on fairly extensive research we have done over the last 12 months," says Reeves.
Reeves talks about extending Checkpoint "beyond research and capturing the customer's experience in three minutes before they come to Checkpoint and the three minutes after they leave Checkpoint and incorporate those activities with the platform."
One seemingly minor change that might produce disproportionately large benefits is the link to continue professional education. There has been a link on the upper right hand of the page for CPE. "We changed that to learning; customers like the term learning more than CPE," says Reeves
Whatever it's called, if a user comes upon a issue that calls for some explanation. "If we have an online course on that issue they can stop and take that hour course.They can capture that and bill the client," he continues.
Intuit has been the market for 12 months with its ProLine Research product, based on research from BNA. That is, it has been in the market in a very limited way with a research platform that has been available only to users of its Lacerte and ProSeries tax software.
That's changing as the company makes ProLine available to all users. And it's keeping the same one price for per firm that it has offered with the initial launch. That price is $849 for the entire firm for unlimited use. Farley says for most firms ProLine represents a savings of about $1,000 per firm. The company also offers a $19.95 pay-per-use plan in which a retrieved article can be printed, saved or attached to a return.
Beyond those changes, Intuit is planning to give users access to the research product on Apple's iPhone and iPad. Farley says the applications will be fully function and users can accomplish the same research tasks on mobile devices that they currently can perform at the desktop.
CCH is going to provide mobile access to new on its IntelliConnect research platform, starting this year with the Blackberry and adding the iPhone by early next year.Users will be able to access the IRS code and regulations and there will also be Blackberry access to some Smart Charts.
