Loopio is a Toronto-based RFP response software provider that helps companies streamline their process for RFPs, DDQs, and Security Questionnaires. Loopio’s RFP response software is for RFIs, Security Questionnaires, DDQs, and sales proposals.
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XaitPorter
Score 9.0 out of 10
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XaitPorter is a co-authoring software solution for teams to collaboratively create, manage and produce documents. With it, users can streamline and optimize document production to maximize revenue from bids and proposals and other business-critical documents. XaitPorter is designed to enable co-authors to focus on creating bid-winning content so that teams can become more efficient while production time and costs are reduced.
I use Loopio specifically for RFP's mostly. I think it is a great and adequate tool for this and much of what I think that needs to improve are not large needle movers for me since the software as a whole is fantastic. It is very easy to upload an RFP into Loopio and begin answering those questions or pulling from previously answered questions. I also will use Loopio for large client proposals and I often use the "search functionality within Loopio to see if I can find answers to clients questions. I like that I can also pull images from Loopio as well and often use those visualizations in my proposals.
XaitPorter is ideal when a large document, containing many (preferably independent) sections is being created by more than five writers across different office locations and is subject to review by multiple reviewers and requires formal approval. It is particularly suited for external documents which are to be delivered as a non-editable PDF file.
This tool gives us the opportunity to work together. We always work in the last revision.
We can write comments as we go along and all involved will see it straight away.
We can structure it the way we want/our the way customer wants it and print the whole book in one go. We are sure that pictures/text/tables are where they are supposed to be (they have not moved around the document as it does when using Microsoft Word).
Adding new answers to the library was easier and better with the "close the loop" functionality. Now, it seems like it is easier to miss questions to add to the library.
It would be helpful to improve functions used to organize and reorganize sections. They work fine, but could be retooled for ease of use. Simple drag-drop over the tree-view from the primary navigator (not only in the dedicated dialog for reordering sections) would be very good. It would be good to support simple flagging or tagging of sections to indicate whatever is meaningful to the user (e.g., to flag a section as imported text that needs formatting, or a section that is high priority for review). The icons do change to indicate predefined workflow states (e.g. approved), but there isn't support for a user-defined tag, perhaps with the ability to filter by tag as many newer applications can do. That would be handy. These aren't criticisms so much as product enhancement suggestions.
The editor is ok but could be tuned up a bit. For example, styles in the toolbar dropdown apply only to the whole paragraph. It's hard to indent text. The button tool doesn't consistently remove the button attribute on an existing button; works sometimes, sometimes not. Little stuff. Overall it's adequate for text creation.
The process of defining templates and styles appears to be a black art. While it's something you don't do often, it should be simplified and better exposed to ordinary admins.
The ability to have more than one section open at a time in the editor would be fantastic. Great productivity tool.
Word import/export could be cleaner.
The ability to export to html with user-defined style sheets would open new markets for Xait. If the product had that, we'd use Xait to maintain our online help site too.
The ability to link to externally stored images rather than lock them inside the Xait library would be huge, as we've expressed to the support team. We manage hundreds of images (diagrams, screen shots etc.) that are used throughout the company, not just for Xait documents. We would like to store them on a file system (e.g. Dropbox) and have them update into Xait automatically when the master copy is modified. This is a very important capability, though in fairness we didn't find it in other products either. Explicit support for Dropbox/Google Drive/Box would be one way, but dynamic linking a la Microsoft Word would be fine, maybe even better.
Usability is good but falls short of excellent. The interface is clean and well organized. They clearly spent some time working on the UI and took some feedback from focus groups to help keep it tidy. On a few occasions, we have experienced a little bit of lag while updating the question database. I'd like to see just a little faster response time on a consistent basis.
They're very supportive and reply in a timely manner. Whenever I contacted the support I received a helpful reply that actually solved my issue. Quite often when my team suggested an improvement that would simplify and speed up our work it happened not long after which is perfect for us.
He was really good. He came from Xait and trained us for several days. He got all involved and answered the questions asked. He was a professional trainee
The standard product for many years has been Microsoft Word. Some have tried to use SharePoint as a collaborative tool, but it is not suited for the purpose and is generally very user un-friendly. It is not intuitive and we have very few persons with any competency in it. Porter is easy to pick up and the new interface is very intuitive, and the way that Porter works removes many of the typical layout and formatting choices that made Microsoft Word so difficult for the average employee. It also greatly simplifies and reduces the amount of corrective work that tender support staff used to have to do. We are not aware of any product in the market that comes close to Porter. It is an ideal product that was purpose built for collaborative writing.
I have saved hundreds of hours working in Loopio instead of answering RFP's on my own. This has allowed me to spend other hours elsewhere. Having an RFP management tool has been an incredible timesaver
The creation and management of questions has also saved me hours of time in searching out tough questions to answer and has also saved my colleagues time as well since we don't need to collaborate to find answers.
Have had some issues with downloading the proposal in a readable format for clients to view. I've sometimes had to go back and figure out what went wrong when exporting which can be frustrating- especially when dealing with very tight deadlines.
Too soon to tell. Right now we're still at the near end of the value chain - it still seems expensive given the outputs to date. But we have a lower proposal volume than some companies, so you need to factor that in.
Also, the named user licensing is restrictive and problematic in a small company where people perform multiple roles and may dip in and out of the proposal development process over a period of weeks or months. A concurrent user model would be much, much better for us, though I understand you'd need to figure out a way to handle email notifications.
