2017 was a year of refinement and expansion for Fuseworks.
During the year we did a feature by feature review, often working collaboratively with customers, to identify opportunities to polish and extend the Fuseworks experience.
No part of the app has been left untouched, from the hosting infrastructure, through to performance-focused changes to the front end, and the workflow of individual features.
The result is an experience that’s faster – and we think slicker in some key areas:
Reporting
Email reports are our most popular feature, and we’ve worked hard to create the most customisable, most flexible reporting solution in the market.
The big change during 2017 was the move to an entirely customisable scheduler. For a long time, we’ve offered a range of report frequency options (daily, hourly etc.) – which makes them super easy to set up.
But what if you want different report frequencies, on different days?
The custom scheduler lets you create, for example, a report that delivers hourly (during your office hours) on Monday to Friday, and then say once or twice a day on the weekend. Your options are now pretty much limitless.
We’ve also added another way to manage delivery to people within your organisation. In addition to recipients being able to subscribe and unsubscribe themselves via the Reports Centre, users of the core Fuseworks app can now pause and resume delivery of a report for all of the recipients within their organisation (particularly handy during the Christmas/New Year period).
Tweaks and enhancements aplenty
We’ve found that small changes can sometimes save a customer a considerable amount of time. We love identifying those sorts of opportunities and invest a considerable amount of development time in continually optimising workflows and how features work to streamline the experience. Some of the wins that fit into that category which rolled out during 2017 include:
- A rework of the newsletter builder to make it easy to drag and drop an article into precisely the right spot in your newsletter.
- A new expanded view for the newsletter builder, to more easily and quickly reorder news based on its level of importance to your organisation.
- Changes to the default treatment of media releases added to Fuseworks, including adding more granular permissions around who can see them, as well as streamlining the sending workflow.
- Optimisations to the bulk tagging tool, to make it even easier to tag multiple stories at once (i.e., for sentiment tracking).
- A new ‘in-app’ customer support option, allowing you to ask questions and provide feedback directly through the interface.
Coverage
In 2012 we launched our online news monitoring, in 2015 we added key print publications, and in 2017 we significantly revamped our approach to monitoring broadcast news.
We still emphasise surfacing audio, and video clippings posted online by broadcasters so that they can be viewed and listened in the most timely and direct way possible – but we’ve supplemented that by ramping up the number of TV and radio digests we’re creating.
Our new bulletin feature shows customers where exactly a story appeared within the bulletin (e.g. if it was the lead story or the 12th item) and what was said. You can also ‘zoom out’ to see the item in the context of the overall bulletin. You can read more about how that works here.
What’s next
Teaser: Our other big project in 2017 was rethinking our approach to mobile. Key parts of the Fuseworks experience (i.e.: hosted newspaper articles) have been mobile optimised from the start – but we think there’s the opportunity to do a lot more. It’s not just about taking the core app and shrinking it to fit in your pocket – we wanted to create a new sort of experience that really only makes sense on mobile.
What does that mean? We can’t quite tell you yet – but we’re excited with the progress development is making, and when it’s ready, you’ll be the first to know 😉
Have a fantastic 2018!
The Fuseworks team