As a software company, there’s nothing better than knowing you’re solving customer problems with a new software release. When it comes to building software, it’s easy to fall into a trap of creating new features that, while nice, make little-to-no difference to the end user. At Objective, we’re in the business of helping our customers transform their worlds by giving them tools to make their business processes easier, faster, simpler, more reliable and safe.

You may have heard that we’re on the verge of releasing a major update for Objective Connect. Around the office we’re referring to this release as ‘next gen’. Our message to the market is that this is the next generation of secure external collaboration.

We’ve been on the road and online talking to our customers about the next gen release and what’s in store. The reaction we’ve received from customers has buoyed our excitement to the next level. Hearing comments like, “this is exactly what we’ve been asking for”, has reinforced for me what I already knew: our customers spoke, we listened, and we are delivering an awesome update that is giving them what they told us they wanted. It's that simple.

The innovations we’ve made in Objective Connect will enable you and your teams to do more with external parties. Starting with the new Objective Design Language, or ODL. If ODL sounds familiar, that’s because it is – it’s the common user interface that is deployed across the Objective family of solutions. ODL has been applied to Connect, making it faster to navigate and simpler to understand key features.

Beyond a new look and feel the next generation updates make it easier to locate content. All Office documents, PDFs and Image files saved to Connect, will now be identifiable by a thumbnail image.

Similarly, we are adding the ability to view Office documents, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint in the browser, removing the need to download; something you can do today with PDF and Image files.

Not all collaboration is two-way

This is what I was referring to earlier with regards to us really taking on feedback from our users. Within our customer base, we know that there are multiple use-cases requiring organisations to share content but restrict the ability to download local copies. As such we will be adding a new ability that only allows Participants to Preview documents in the browser and never download a local copy. We will even add a watermark for added security.

Want to get involved early? You can! We’re about to move into preview mode, where we are inviting a small number of our customers to participate. This will unlock early access to some of the features I’ve described above. The benefits of jumping on the preview are to get your organisation a head start on next year’s main roll out and to pilot the product. You can choose who is involved – some or all of your users and you can go back to the existing interface at any time.

To be a part of the preview, simply email us at connect@objective.com.