Posts By: Elizabeth Caley
Elizabeth Caley, VP, Product Management
As Vice President of Product Management, Elizabeth is responsible for product strategy, product marketing and design. Prior to joining Firmex, she spent 5 years at Microsoft, most recently holding end-to-end responsibility for Canada’s largest business unit including Office, SharePoint, and Exchange. Previously, Elizabeth held executive roles focused on product strategy and M&A at global software companies including Frayman, Hummingbird, and Delano.
LinkedIn
Aug 23, 2011 - by Elizabeth Caley
Greetings from hot and sunny Nashville!
The first official day of the ILTA 2011 Rev-elation Conference got off to a great start with 1200 participants in attendance.
For those who aren’t familiar, ILTA’s annual conference is a great event that brings together attorneys, legal IT professionals, practice support, litigation and knowledge management experts to share knowledge for developing new for their firm’s success. Best of all, there’s Law2020™, ILTA’s multi-year, multi-platform educational programming initiative focusing on how law firms will have to adapt in order to thrive over the next decade.
Read More
Aug 10, 2011 - by Elizabeth Caley
Starting yesterday, over 100,000 users have access to a new Firmex release when they next log in. What has the team been busy working on for the last few months? Making it easier for you to communicate.
Read More
Jun 7, 2011 - by Elizabeth Caley
Tightening FDA approval standards are pushing Life Sciences firms to make even further investments in technologies that support secure document sharing with multiple parties. At Firmex, our life sciences clients continue to open more data rooms and use more bandwidth and storage than any other industry segment.
The Life Sciences industry includes organizations involved in pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, medical devices and clinical research, all companies with highly capital intensive development pipelines. To be successful, these firms must fill their pipelines with a steady stream of potential products from a range of R&D efforts, knowing that only a few will become commercial successes.
We asked our Life Sciences clients to explain why they are such active users of data rooms, and here is what they told us:
Read More
Apr 12, 2011 - by Elizabeth Caley
On the weekend, Firmex went live with our new user management features, and I would like to thank the Firmex community of users for their ongoing support and feedback.
To see how we’ve made user management even easier, watch the how to video available from a new link inside your project. These videos will walk you through the improved process on how to add, remove, and delete users.
We go to great lengths to ensure that users are part of our product development, and we’re proud of the relationships we’ve built through our expert client services team, our regular customer satisfaction surveys, and our Users First Community forum. It was out of these conversations that the suggestion to focus on our user management features first came.
Read More
Mar 10, 2011 - by Elizabeth Caley
I had the pleasure of having lunch with an Investment Director for a mid-sized Private Equity firm this week. Over very good spicy tuna, we talked about the market recovery and the valuation trends in clean tech, life sciences and technology companies specifically. Given his expertise in venture capital, M&A evaluation, contract negotiations and venture debt, there was certainly a lot to discuss.
Even though compliance and reporting requirements were ever-present concerns for the firm, fundraising was top of his mind that day. With a new fund in the works, it was fascinating to hear about the delicate dance that takes place between fundraiser and a prospective investor. As primarily high net worth individuals facing many potential investment options, it soon became clear that the role technology can play in fundraising is a delicate, but important, one.
“Five minutes trying to figure out how to reset a password, and he’s gone!” my lunch guest bemoaned, referring to the patience level of his typical prospect. “Just email it to me” is a common refrain when a VDR technology doesn’t work or is too complex for busy users.
Read More
Feb 16, 2011 - by Elizabeth Caley
When a new technology emerges, wars are waged to create market standards, and the victorious companies involved control the market and the options available for end users. Defining internet standards has been an ongoing series of battles, and we are witnessing a new frontline around applications delivered on highly controlled platforms like the iPhone or iPad. Enforcing strict standards can limitthe options available to users, and yet the strict control exerted by Apple and their deliberate focus on design has yielded a highly positive user experience that attracts a loyal following.
An array of options and freedoms comes at a cost to the user who is forced to spend time on analysis to make an informed choice – for a business this investment in time means lost productivity - and more and more businesses are looking for reliable options that just work.
Read More
Feb 11, 2011 - by Elizabeth Caley
We hope you’ve noticed the improvements that have been appearing in Firmex over the last few months. The product team is dedicated to making sure that you, our users, can take advantage of continuous innovation – and wow, we’re excited about how excited you’ve been!
You told us you wanted an easier way to download lots of documents at once – and so we introduced Bulk Download. It’s been great to hear that you love how easy it is to get some or all of your documents so they are available locally (respecting permissions of course.) In just a few short weeks, we’ve had over 150GB of documents downloaded! And we are getting valuable feedback that’s driving our ongoing development. For more information on how to use Bulk Download, please see your new Support Knowledge Base.
You told us you wanted a better way to inform your users about the current stage of your business process, whether it is an ongoing project or short-term business transaction. So we introduced Stage – a simple way to classify and organize your deals, projects, and workspaces. Right now, a project administrator can indicate if a project is being set-up, or in-progress or maybe on-hold, for example. And soon these labels will be customizable by administrators by project template.
You told us you wanted to receive email invitations faster. So we put our best minds on it, and now our Client Services team is happy to report that if email invitations get sent any faster, we might cause a tear in the space/time continuum.
Just a few examples of what is now available to you, the users and administrators of Firmex. For all the details on the latest releases – and a Sneak Peek at what’s upcoming -- please visit your Firmex Support Knowledge Base and navigate to Firmex Product Updates.
Feb 3, 2011 - by Elizabeth Caley
A few weeks ago, I posted about the importance of listening – and what a great response, so thank you!
Listening has led to a couple of important improvements the last few months and more are in the works.
Today, we’re pleased to announce a new way to have your voice heard – by joining the Firmex Users First Community. Members of the Users First Community have the opportunity to try out new features before they are generally available to other Firmex customers. We have regular webcasts and feedback sessions to talk about upcoming developments.
The time investment is minimal -- less than 90 minutes over a few weeks -- and you can opt-out of participating for a specific release when you don’t have the time.
Your feedback is important to us. If you're interested in being an early adopter for one of our upcoming releases, the Firmex Users First Community is growing and we'd love to have you be a part. Your time is valuable so we promise to make good use of it.
Even if the Firmex Users First Community is not for you, please continue to send your comments, ideas and feedback to us. There is a good chance you’ll see your suggestion in an upcoming release! We’d love to hear from you.
Nov 8, 2010 - by Elizabeth Caley
Today marks the start of my third week at Firmex. People ask me what I do. I could answer about the business unit I managed at Microsoft, or the product portfolio at Hummingbird, or the scope of my responsibilities as VP of Product Management at Firmex.
Instead, I answer this way, “I listen."
I’ve had the pleasure of listening to 1% of our customers in my first weeks through a series of calls and visits. Might not sound like a lot, but my plan is to continue listening. I’d like to have listened to every Firmex virtual deal room customer in the next 18 to 24 months.
Here’s what I’ve heard so far:
I’ve learnt that our customers are using Firmex virtual data rooms for a tremendous breadth of uses beyond M&A.
I’ve learnt that there is a huge amount of respect and admiration for our Customer Support team. I’ve learnt that there are many commonalities to how our customers want Firmex to continue to develop as a product.
And yes, there are things here and there that folks want us to change and fix in the short term. I’m keeping a list and we’re prioritizing, and getting them scheduled with the development team. I’ll be keeping everybody updated on our progress.
In the meantime, give me a call or send me an email -- if you have ideas for my list or you want to talk about how you’re using Firmex today and planning on using it tomorrow. I’m listening.
