Xait Porter - Nobody does it better!
Software Version
Porter 5
Overall Satisfaction with XaitPorter
Porter is used by our Business Development organisation to prepare and publish proposals and tender responses which we submit to both our existing and prospective customers. These documents involve input from a number of different persons or departments and Porter helps organise and manage the workflow.
Porter replaces Microsoft Word as our primary tool for this work, and we find that it provides measureable savings in the time needed and the cost of producing these documents. It also provides us with improved security, better administrative control and allows us to produce more professional looking documents with a consistent and uniform appearance that our customers have told us that they appreciate.
- Porter provides a consistent layout and format throughout the document package.
- Porter provides complete control and visibility over who has access and what they can do on a project by project basis.
- Porter's workflow tracks the progress against deadlines of multiple users involved in writing, reviewing and approving sections of a document.
- Porter has an effective commenting tool that allows a team to collaborate during the compilation of a document.
- Adding attachments in Porter 5 does not yet allow for cropping of these, although that was available in the previous version.
- Sections with large tables tend to slow down Porter as it seems to take more effort to perform the background update and refresh.
- We have seen reduced overtime costs for tender support staff who used to spend a lot of time managing and dealing with version control issues, formatting issues, layout issues and printing issues
- We have experienced that Porter has allowed us to handle more work without increasing our staffing.
- The quality of our submissions has improved both by the switch to Porter, and further by the increased proficiency of both our administrators and writers.
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.