The Advantage Software Company Unveils new “Blue” Software
at Las Vegas Users Group conference
(Mooresville, NC) – The Advantage Software Company announced the release of a major software update called “blue” during the 2011 Advantage Users Group conference in Las Vegas October 22-24, 2011. “Blue is the culmination of the past two years of a major software foundation update,” said Advantage Software Company President Ellen Coulter. “The new features of blue bring incredible control, organization and collaboration tools to our advertising agency and marketing firm customers that have never been seen in the marketplace before.”
Blue enhances the Advantage suite of software products using advanced technologies like HTML5 and Microsoft .NET to operate in both Client Server and Web environments. “As a leading agency software developer and provider, we use our technology and business forecasting models as a guideline for how agencies will need to use both the emerging technologies and marketplace business trends to successfully grow their agency,” said Coulter. “We then develop and grow our software capabilities to accommodate those technology and business marketplace forecasts.”
Advantage blue is designed and developed for maximum user experience on both the individual and collaborative team levels. Improved standards and consistency across the blue software bring our agency members multi-tasking opportunities that are very unique in the industry.
“Advantage blue is built around the personal experience of one user that scales so easily for larger collaborative agency teams,” said Coulter. “We developed blue to provide a smoother, more personal, more robust user experience with fewer clicks, interactive reports and graphs, and faster access to agency data.”
Some of the major updates available with Advantage blue include easier-to-use and customizable Invoice Printing, Broadcast Media, Billing Command Center, Project Schedules, Calendars, Two-way Integration with Outlook, Document Markups, Time Entry, and Report Writer.
“Today’s modern agency likes snapshots and dashboards that provide an instant picture of how an employee, department, project, and the agency are performing,” said Coulter. “We developed a sophisticated, real-time series of dashboards that process hundreds to thousands of moving parts within the agency to provide accurate performance snapshots that help our agency clients evaluate progress and make stronger business decisions.”
Advantage blue features robust Proactive Alerts that deliver crucial information to the desktop for time-critical items like Missing Time, Quote vs. Actual Results, Past Due Tasks, Upcoming Tasks and other points that users define.
Project Management in Advantage blue introduces exciting, easier-to-use features and integration that agency users will covet. “One of the most exciting parts of the new Advantage blue is how quickly and easily our users will create and manage project timelines,” says Coulter. “They will have the amazing ability to calculate and update project schedules in phases, find available staff, view and update all schedules from a single screen, recalculate dates, edit schedule details including tasks, and track project percent completions!”
The new Advantage blue Calendar is much more interactive and allows for easy editing of schedules and assignments using our new “drag and drop” feature. Early Beta users are telling us that they really enjoy using the new Timeline “Gantt” View. “Our new Timeline Gantt View empowers users with a real-time visual chart that displays which staff is working on which project,” adds Coulter. “Our Beta users are very excited about the new Timeline Gantt View technology and user interfaces!”
Project Management in Advantage blue empowers users with abilities like drilling down to all assignments by staff member to balance the project workload, accessing project schedules directly without leaving the workload view, and analyzing risks to find out where projects are before they go over budget using our new Risk Analysis tools and Project Burn Rate Charts and Graphs.
Media Estimates in Advantage blue now include Broadcast. “We are very excited about what blue has included for our Media users,” says Coulter. “Just like other media types, users can now estimate proposed media expenditures, secure approvals, and then generate orders automatically with zero re-keying of data!”
With Advantage blue, the TV and Radio Order applications now include Standard Broadcast and Calendar Month Buys as well as Daily Buys to handle direct response and other types of daily broadcast advertising.
“These new and powerful options in Media allow for the most flexible bill and reporting options available in the marketplace today,” adds Coulter. “We also created special features for our Media users like ‘copy’ and ‘auto create’ to quickly create new orders for any period of time using default data while drastically cutting back on data entry time!”
Advantage blue contains hundreds of new and strengthened processes that have never been seen in the agency marketplace before. “We developed blue by listening to what agencies wanted and needed from their business software partner,” said Coulter. “What they will now see in blue are easy-to-use interfaces and navigation with identifiable icons featuring a customizable Navigation Window that allows users to create their own menu based on their preferences.”
Advantage blue includes all-new applications like Dynamic Report and Advanced Report Writers that give users more control over the vast amount of data where they can write their own job summary, job detail and other reports. “The Report Writer is a huge favorite of our Beta users because it gives them literally an unlimited amount of options to sort, display, group, and customize data on almost every aspect of agency data.”
To arrange a custom tour of Advantage blue and learn more about how this amazing suite of agency software products can literally change your agency business, contact The Advantage Software Company at 800-841-2078 or visit us online at www.whatsblue.com or www.gotoadvantage.com.
