The New Firmex Knowledge Base
The Firmex Knowledge Base recently received a facelift! Changes to the design and updated articles provide more clarity and ease use for our clients and their users. Some of the changes include:
Read MoreSearch results for the "Product" category
The Deal Knowledge Advantage
How important is deal knowledge? What pieces of information will give you, as the buyer or seller, the leg up on getting the best possible deal done? One of the easiest places to gain information that will give you the edge -- your virtual deal room.
When you select a virtual deal room, rather than leaving it up to the other parties, you gain the advantage. And when you select the right virtual deal room provider, with the right reporting capabilities, your advantage is magnified.
Read MoreSoftware Performance Correlates with End User Productivity
Over the course of the last year, Firmex has made major investments in our product group. From deep talent hires to doubling our head count in development, to investing in SOC 2 audits and partnering with a content acceleration provider – we are serious about ensuring our customers enjoy a consistently high experience when it comes to working with Firmex.
Read MoreWhy communication is important to your deal
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.
How to express client appreciation through hard work
Every business wants their clients to feel appreciated, but not every business is prepared to invest what it takes to show their appreciation and earn the respect of clients. A search online for ‘virtual data room provider’ will result in a several companies that provide online portals for sharing documents. Only the top VDR providers offer the product features for conducting high value financial transactions like due diligence for M&A deals. But when it comes to getting a deal done, arguably the most important data room feature to consider is the quality of client support they provide.
Read MoreFirmex launches a redesigned website
Yesterday we launched a redesigned website. Our previous website design was launched in 2008, and like an old car it was trustworthy and full of good memories, but it was starting to show its age.As an online data room provider, our website is our storefront, and plays a critical role in how we communicate with the outside world. So we focused our redesign on ensuring that we can successfully deliver the information that our visitors are looking for.
What visitors to our website want:
- A definition of what a virtual data rooms is.
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Examples of how virtual data rooms are used for different solutions:
- Biotech Licensing, Clinical Study Start Up
- Governance & Compliance, Corporate Finance, Board Reporting, Financial Audit
- Client Extranet, Litigation
- EPC Bids, Procurement & Bids, Restructuring, Real Estate, Document Repository
- Fundraising, Private Placements, LP Reporting
- Mergers & Acquisitions, Transaction Closings
- Customer testimonials and a customer list of some of the corporations, law firms, and investment banks that use Firmex.
- A straightforward list of pricing options and turnaround time
- Proof of our world-class security
- The latest news, blog posts, and tweets on topics that matter
We see the website as another opportunity to engage our clients in conversations, and we couldn’t be more excited about what the future holds.
Our users are behind every improvement we make
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 MoreVirtual Data Rooms - Top 5 pricing considerations
When you’re procuring a virtual data room (VDR), time is of the essence and price is always a factor for you and your clients. During discussions with a potential VDR partner, make sure you know what is included in the price. Knowing what to look for will ensure that you avoid surprise discussions around hidden fees, so you can concentrate your time on the deal - not the data room. Here are five things to clarify when obtaining a price for a virtual data room:
- Price Certainty – Make sure the VDR price is fixed and there are no hidden fees for support, services or additional storage. Any fees for extending the length of the deal should also be discussed upfront, just in case the deal process take longer than expected, which tends to happen.
- Page Count – I have always been perplexed by per page pricing. Who counts thousands of pages? What happens if pages are added or deleted as the deal progresses? Do you pay for blank pages, tables of contents, cover pages? Per page pricing is an outdated pricing model that has its origins in commercial printing. Per page pricing is not suited for the digital age and should be avoided at all costs.
- Storage – Secure storage doesn’t have to be expensive. Some vendors will flaunt the fact that they store your data on their own secure servers, but if you start asking questions, you’ll likely find that their features don’t measure up against an industry leader like SunGard. SunGard specializes in data storage and security for the world’s top financial institutions and SunGard’s systems account for and manage more than $25 trillion in investment assets and process more than five million trades a day.
- Training and Consultation – Find out how much training is included for the price and the experience level of the trainers. You don’t want to end up paying extra fees because a system is hard to use and you want to trust the person who is helping you set-up your deal.
- Support – Anything less than 24/7/365 is not good enough, and shouldn’t cost extra. Deals span time zones and people work after hours and on weekends. You and your clients need peace of mind that all of your users will be supported, anywhere and anytime.
At Firmex we pride ourselves on providing our clients with straightforward pricing and reliable service that ensures the client experience comes first.
Updates from the Product Team
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.
Users First Community
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.