ACS is happy to announce the addition of Vidal, our third client based in France. (Bayard Presse was the first, and Agora France became the second, going live in October 2008). Vidal became a client in mid-November and the implementation is well underway. Located in Issy-les-Moulineaux, just outside of Paris, Vidal publishes medical information to French healthcare professionals. They publish a well-known book which provides drug interaction information to medical professionals. They also publish a variety of other products including: subscription-based newsletters, electronic subscriptions, advertising and other one-off products.

Vidal began searching for a new system early in 2008 and was interested in seeing Advantage because they knew that Bayard Presse had gone live successfully on it. At a software presentation at Vidal's office in June, they were impressed with the functionality of Advantage and found that it could handle their business with little or no modification. After a six month evaluation of both French and American software systems, the decision was made that Advantage was the best product on the market and that it matched all of their needs.

Claire Baldeyrou, Vidal's CFO and executive sponsor of the project, has this to say about Advantage: "The functionality of Advantage is up-to-date and constantly improving to follow market trends." And regarding the project, Claire says: "The professionalism of both teams in Paris and Ann Arbor, Michigan is a great comfort (even if everyone does not speak French!)"

Levi Hyssong is the ACS project manager, working closely with Philippe van-Mastrigt as the European Project Director. The Vidal team includes Claire Baldeyrou as the executive sponsor and Martine Thiery as the project manager. Go-live is planned for mid-2009.

It promises to be one of the best meetings yet when the Advantage User Group heads to sunny--if the weather cooperates--Florida later this month. The conference will kick off on Wednesday afternoon, January 21st, with presentations on "Advantage as a Marketing Partner," a recap on the AMB forum of 2008 and an update on the exciting new Business Intelligence module under development. These will be led by Dan Heffernan, Dick Hile and Corey Mantel. A reception follows the sessions.

Thursday begins with guest speaker Patrick Sheposh of Crain Communications, followed throughout the day by a client services update from Ev Acton, Greg Stout and others, a presentation by Ogden's Tim Swietek on "Analyzing and Increasing Web Traffic," a report on Advantage software direction by Dan Heffernan and Dick Hile and the annual New Features review by Mona Hidayet.

Due to their popularity at past meetings, four roundtables led by clients and "anchored" by an ACS expert are scheduled for Friday morning. They are: "Using the AMB module," led by various clients and anchored by Kathie Porter; "Best Practices for Using Web Services and AIS," led by Steve Cook of Wolters Kluwer and anchored by Matt Varblow; "Email Service Provider Integration," led by Waylon Butler of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and anchored by Dick Hile; and "Upgrade Strategies and Best Practices," led by Joe Wixted of Our Sunday Visitor and Nikki Lorenz of Kalmbach, and anchored by Paul DesRosiers.

Attendees may also choose to visit the ACS Remote Support Center, which will be open on Friday during the roundtables. The meeting concludes after conducting User Group business on Friday afternoon. Of course, there will be many opportunities throughout the three days for networking, sharing meals with new friends and old ones, and enjoying what Orlando has to offer to its visitors. If you aren't able to attend this year's meeting, start planning now to make it to the one next year. You won't be sorry.

Let me start by wishing you a Happy New Year!

2008 was a tough year for many industries. Here in Michigan, countless businesses and households have been hit hard by woes of the big-three automakers, in addition to the general challenges of a struggling economy. While ACS is not unaffected by the economic conditions, the list of prospective clients interested in Advantage remains steady and we are doing okay. Among the Advantage community, I hear with some frequency of publishers and associations cutting back on staff, reducing issue frequencies, and merging titles. Unfortunately, many of our clients serve market segments that are significantly affected by the current recession.

Nevertheless, we continue to see promising signs among our user community. It is our goal to help all discover new ways to utilize Advantage functionality and ACS services to deal effectively with the new challenges that we’ll face in 2009. With increasing frequency, we are seeing success among our clients in combating slow circulation and book sales by broadening traditional print offerings to embrace online content delivery. Another successful endeavor is honing business intelligence through more sophisticated data collection and analysis, for use in making more informed and up-to-the-minute marketing and operations decisions. We've also seen some publishers increase their revenues through our Teleservices module or by offering conferences through our Conference and Event module.

At ACS, we're excited by our expansion in Europe and the UK. Important new British publishers have joined the Advantage user community in the last several years, and in France we are continuing to see great promise for new publishers joining the user group. We recently completed a pilot project in Denmark, and are hopeful that we’ll be starting an implementation there soon. In December, we started an Advantage implementation at Vidal, our third Parisian client (see article on Vidal in this issue). Phil Montgomery and his project team are now busy with another pilot project for a major newspaper publisher in France. Next week, when I am back in Paris for meetings with our clients, I will be meeting with a French business consultancy to continue our work setting up an ACS office in Paris.

Our work with publishers, associations and service bureaus around the world has enabled us to add functionality to Advantage that offers our user community everywhere an even more powerful tool set for growing their business. I remember in 1998 how excited we were to introduce the ability to have multiple addresses for every customer in Advantage. Today, Advantage has grown significantly to provide multi-language, multi-office, and multi-local functionality. ‘Multi-local’ is terminology Philippe van-Mastrigt, our ACS representative in Paris, has coined to describe Advantage’s capacity to allow a publisher with multiple international offices to interact with local users in their own language, using local regulations for distribution, taxation, payment cards, etc.

We’re also excited about progress with the new Advantage Business Intelligence module that will help you analyze trends, target opportunities, and increase your revenues… important functionality for tough economic times. It is fortunate that our full-blown implementation of Business Intelligence technology for Advantage comes at a time when Microsoft has introduced a great suite of tools for this purpose, at a reasonable price. There was a product forum on the new BI module held at ACS/Ann Arbor in the Fall, and we received valuable feedback from many of you that has further shaped BI module development. We’re looking forward to presenting a BI forum re-cap at the Advantage User Group conference in Orlando January 21 – 23.

As many of our clients face a growing demand in 2009 to produce more with less, I thought it would be helpful to mention three areas of significant enhancement to Advantage that target helping you meet more stringent compliance requirements, reduce costs, and grow your revenues. These are all projects designed to help you optimize business operations, while gaining strategic advantage in your respective market segment.

Compliance

•  Consolidation of credit card and direct debit information to a single secure table
•  Increased capabilities in credit card storage, masking, and encryption
•  User session activity recording and reporting
•  Revamped user security that mirrors MS Windows with domain-level authentication
•  Daily reconciliation of subscription liability, earnings, and accounts receivable

Cost Reduction

• Significant improvements in job scheduling and automation to free up staff resources that would normally be required to manage nightly processing
• Core Advantage offline processes optimized to run 24x7
• Highly customizable workspaces for easily tailoring Advantage views to your organization structure, facilitating faster data entry and customer service transactions
• Powerful data entry scripting tools to improve data entry speed and facilitate various types of data entry functions

Revenue Growth

• An SQL query builder tool for easily and rapidly creating list selections against your data
• Data warehousing tools for analyzing circulation, product order, accounts receivable, and financial data
• Significant improvements in the Advantage e-commerce modules

In addition to developing these new software features, ACS has introduced important new services over the past year, all designed to help publishers, membership associations, and service bureaus do more with less during difficult economic times. At the Advantage User Group Conference later this month, we’ll be describing some of these special projects and new services our clients have taken advantage of. Here are some examples:

•  More comprehensive support for new company acquisitions, in-conversions, and division consolidations
• ACS system administrators managing your Advantage offline processing
• ACS engineers developing custom revenue modules
• ACS web site developers creating custom e-commerce websites.

We expect that 2009 will continue to be challenging for the publishing industry. How are your Advantage operations doing? During times of ‘tightening the belt’, are you finding ways to meet new challenges of reduced budgets while not jeopardizing current core business or compromising efforts to exploit opportunities for expansion? Let us know if there is something more ACS can be doing to help you meet your goals this year.

The first release of 2009 offers some exciting new features and will be available in early February. Here are some highlights:

• Conference and Event: You can now choose to defer income for conference registrations entered within the CEM module (previously, all income was earned up front when the registration was posted). This will allow you to accept registration orders, but not earn the associated income until the actual start of the conference. This behavior is variable at the individual conference/location level.
  
• Gift Subs: A new analysis table, CIRPMG-M, tracks promotion responses for subscriptions that have been specifically identified as "gifts." While one definition of a gift subscription is simply one where the bill-to and ship-to customers are different, CIRPMG-M uses a specific flag on the donor type record to identify gift subscriptions. The table allows you to report on such conditions as gift subscriptions where the donor her/himself is one of the recipients.
  
• Upsell from an upsell: Advantage upsell functionality has been enhanced to allow you to upsell from one specific promotion choice to another. For example, you could set up two offers for a subscription under a promotion, one for a 12-month term and one for a 24-month term. When the 12-month term is ordered, your upsell setup can prompt the rep to promote the 24-month choice to the customer.
  
• Subject Chains: Advantage now supports searching for products by pre-defined item subjects, as well as building "subject chains" for a collection of items. Subject chains are used mostly on websites, and allow you to provide drill-down capability to the customer, similar to functionality offered on many e-commerce websites. For example, you could build a chain consisting of "books > nonfiction > sports > golf," where the number of items that satisfy the search decreases as you move down the chain. This will allow your website customers to pinpoint desired items more quickly and efficiently.
  
• Multiple email addresses on CEM and PRO: You can now record multiple e-mail addresses for a single conference registration, or a PRO order line. Similar to the CIREML-M table, the new CEMEML-M and PROEML-M tables will allow you to capture more than one e-mail for a conference participant, or PRO ship-to customer. This can facilitate communication with the customer regarding these orders.

For more information on Advantage 2009R1, contact your ACS Account Manager.

We’ve got some great topics planned for ACS Webinars in 2009. Some are repeats of popular subjects from 2008, while others are new. A new wrinkle this year is that some more far-ranging subjects will be covered in successive hour-long webinars over two or three days.

The sales team will also offer half a dozen or so demos of new release highlights and other software features. As always, the sales demos have no charge.

The first event will take place in the first or second week of February, and the announcement and registration materials will be sent via E-mail by the end of January.
Here is a list of planned topics as of now, in no particular order. The list may change after discussion at the AUG meeting later this month. If you have suggestions and are not attending the AUG meeting, contact Ken Nemerovski.

• SQL Reporting Services with Advantage data
• Config Management - Config Rotation, Compile Procedures
• CDSREQ - Requesting Reports, Job Streams
• Encrypting and Decrypting Credit Cards
• Disaster Recovery
• Duplicate Consolidation
• PCI Compliance
• Online Credit Card Functionality
• MSTDAT/FST Scripting
• Using CDSCLN - keeping system clean
• User Group Security in Advantage
• CIR - Circulation Data Entry 2
• AMB - Access Management and Billing 2
• Reviewing Proclogs and handling Nightly Processing 2
• Customer Service Email Responses/Mail Merge (advanced scripting) 2
• Using CDSDWS 2
• Creating OLAP Cubes 3
• ARP Reconciliation 3

Please visit the Webinar page for further registration information.