Quote Roller (discontinued) vs. VisibleThread VT Docs vs. XaitPorter

VT is fabulous to proposal writing as it created for that. It can also be used for ANY type of persuasive or technical writing. If you can write it, VT can help to make the writing better. BUT!!! if you are writing news articles or descriptive writing, this is NOT the software for you. VT works to eliminate fluff, ambiguous words, exaggerations, run-on sentences, improper grammar, misspelled words, sentence fragments, etc. VT also works to eliminate passive writing. As with any software, use it for what it was created - and find something else for the rest.

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.

Incentivized

• Acronym finder - the best acronym finder I have used! This creates an Excel spreadsheet with the acronyms and their definitions in an alphabetically sorted worksheet ... AND this worksheet includes actual sentences from the document showing how and where the acronym was used.
• Compare documents - WOW! what a wonderful update! You get an Excel worksheet with the 2 compared documents side-by-side showing differences in red and statements with no changes in blue.
• Starter compliance matrix (SCM) - again, one of the best SCM-creators I have used. This choice is quick, concise, and the resulting Excel worksheet is easy to manipulate and change.

• 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).

Incentivized

• Dictionaries - I would like to see more "canned" dictionaries. We create our own, but I know that VT has more that they can supply, giving us more quick turnaround changes (versus always having to start from scratch).

• 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.

Incentivized

There are too many positive aspects versus negative.

We find it to be intuitive to use with a simple menu and right-click based functionality in place.

Incentivized

XaitPorter is always there even though we have issues with outages (suddenly the network does not work, but that is internal issue)

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Our reports/Tenders complete in a reasonable time frame, actually faster than Word. We have not integrated with other systems or softwares.

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They have a clear method for reporting any issues and work hard to get a resolution, keeping me informed of progress.

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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

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The online training was really good. They know the way of getting people involved and they answered all questions asked. They were there for us.

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I was really satisfied with the implementation

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We reviewed many other products but found all of them did not have the extent of tasks that VT had. These searches were over 5 years ago and many of the products reviewed are no longer available. In addition, some software still in existence have merit, just not to the extent we need. I do not want to give anyone a bad rating just because we did not choose them. Again, choose the right software for the right job!

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.

Incentivized

I just love the system

Incentivized

• We reduced proposal writing time and output. By reducing time, we gained time for work in other areas of proposal handling. I used to need 3-5 DAYS to create an acronym list. Now, with VT, I do the same work in 1-2 hours!
• VT is for proposal WRITING and not for proposal HANDLING. Our proposal managers and coordinators do the handling part.

• 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.

Incentivized