As you may know, GMC Software releases an interim release every four months. As we work to bring version 11 to market, we are planning on five interim releases. Just last week, we had the feature demos of the third of these five releases.
As the GMC Software R&D team wraps up the latest release FMAP (First Mover Advantage Program) 10.4, the R&D team meets with the Product Marketing Management team to show us the nearly complete features. While we have many feature updates throughout the process, the last one is special because they are all demonstrated together.
During this 2 hour session, I was able to see the coordination of all of the elements of the GMC Software portfolio. The new Inspire Designer user interface that debuted in FMAP 10.3 (contact support to download) had its design language continue to other products. When 10.5 completes, all of the products will have the new design language, showing Inspire as the seamless portfolio that it is.
We also were able to see three new cloud services in action.
Customer Preference Management is a campaign-style way to help move print-based clients to digital communications by giving them a landing page that enables them to manage their preferences. This automatically coordinates to any omnichannel design to adapt the next production run to their preferences. This cloud service will be available in February for fully supported implementations.
Customer Journey Mapping is in its second FMAP release, and it is connected to Inspire Designer via social comments. Any customer experience (CX) professional can browse a map of available CCM projects, and make comments on a representation of an automatically generated preview. Any comment that is made on this cloud-based map will appear on the Inspire Designer interface within 10 seconds. This is a next generation way to connect CX professionals to the CCM projects that support the customer experiences they manage and curate.
Lastly, our new dashboard product, Inspire Insights connects service provider clients to their providers with relevant information about production, performance, and status of their critical communications. This saves time and reduces manual management of critical projects.
Each of these items is amazing on its own. There is something special in here. Most customer communications management (CCM) vendors seem to have similar total capabilities. But, many of these capabilities are buried in different products, with different trainings, separate R&D teams, and no actual integration. As GMC Software builds version 11, we are putting in extra effort to build cross portfolio coordination as a feature. This will save time, money, and mistakes. This is a critical focus as we witness the rise of the CXO, CCO and CDO in the enterprises of the world.