FreePint Report: Product Review of Factiva

December 2014 Product Review of Factiva

In-depth, independent review of the product, plus links to related resources

“...has some 32,000 sources spanning all forms of content of which thousands are not available on the free web. Some source archives go back to 1951...”

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www.freepint.com © Free Pint Limited 2014 Contents

Introduction & Contact Details 4

Sources - Content and Coverage 5

Technology - Search and User Interface 8

Technology - Outputs, Analytics, Alerts, Help 18

Value - Competitors, Development & Pricing 29

FreePint Buyer’s Guide: News 33

Other Products 35

About the Reviewer 36

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FreePint Report: Product Review of Factiva (ISBN 978-1-78123-181-4) is a FreePint report published by Free Pint Limited.

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This version of the report was published in December 2014 and was accurate as of that date. Contact Information Free Pint Limited 4-6 Station Approach, Ashford, Middlesex, TW15 2QN, United Kingdom Registered Office: Delaport Coach House, Lamer Lane, Wheathampstead, Herts, AL4 8RQ Registered Number: 3754481

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Factiva is the premium global news aggregation solution from Dow Jones.

Factiva is aimed at sophisticated users such as information professionals and also at end users. Corporate customers can also elect to take a number of cheaper Factiva Reader subscriptions which allows users to read news alerts and searches generated by other users.

News Corp’s 10-K filing states that Factiva products are used by 1.1 million users around the world.

Factiva has some 32,000 sources spanning all forms of content of which thousands are not available on the free web. Some source archives go back to 1951.

By Andrew Grave In 2013, Factiva made its own news headlines which were reported extensively in View author biography FreePint. A bold attempt to subsume Factiva alongside other Dow Jones products into a single-platform, single-price approach called DJX was not universally welcomed by customers. Corporate clients began to turn to Factiva’s competitors and institutional revenues fell. Instigator and CEO Lex Fenwick left the company in January 2014 to be replaced by interim and now permanent CEO William Lewis.

Whilst DJX continues to be marketed, sold and used as a comprehensive content solution, the ability to purchase Factiva as a stand-alone product was reintroduced in May 2014.

By reverting to previous commercial terms, Dow Jones also aimed to bring more flexibility to its product and is now concentrating on meeting the needs of its core user base. It has made strong enhancements in content and functionality since the last FreePint product review in December 2012. Factiva now incorporates the former Companies & Executives module which we reviewed in September 2014. FreePint subscribers can read the separate review here.

Additional Factiva Services Factiva Reader: This is a corporate licence permitting companies to share content across an organisation to those employees who do not have Factiva accounts. Typical uses include Factiva content shared via intranets and newsletters.

My Company Today: This comprises a daily collection of news stories tailored to a company. Areas covered include mentions of the company, key industry issues and news on your company’s competitors. It can be delivered directly as a newsletter or via a feed.

Contact Details Dow Jones is a New York-headquartered company with further key offices in London, Barcelona, Frankfurt, Paris and Hong Kong. It has offices in over 50 countries and is part of News Corporation.

This chapter is also published as an article Dow Jones & Co. Contact: Brian Gelinas, executive director in your FreePint 1211 Avenue of the product management Subscription: Americas Email: [email protected] Office locations Factiva (Introduction; Contact Details) New York, NY 10036 Website: www.dowjones.com Contact form USA Twitter: @dowjones Customer support Click to login now and read online »

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One of Factiva’s long-term strengths has been its extremely wide range of content. It currently offers more than 32,000 sources in 28 languages from nearly every country in the world.

Content is updated continuously 24 hours a day. In terms of timeliness, more than 4,000 of these sources are available through Factiva on the date of publication by the original source. Factiva’s archive goes back to 1951.

Factiva states that thousands of its key sources are not available on the free web.

Factiva remains the only database to offer the combined collection of licensed Dow Jones Newswires, The Wall Street Journal and Reuters newswires. In addition, publications from News UK (The Times, The Sun, The Sunday Times and The Sun on Sunday) remain exclusive to Factiva.

I asked Jonathan Palmer, Factiva’s head of content, to explain Factiva’s approach to content. Jonathan explained that Factiva takes a licensed approach to content. As an increasing amount of content goes behind paywalls, Factiva will try and get that content. Other platforms may have some content from the same publications, but may not have all of it.

He says that the team is actively seeking out content from the major metropolitan areas that will be important growth generators well beyond 2015. This enables Factiva’s clients to have the best possible coverage of these areas directly from the most authoritative and original sources.

Jonathan also stressed the importance of Factiva’s global licensing team. Its representatives are based in every time zone, an advantage not enjoyed by its peers. The team has developed good relationships with local publishers because of this. Factiva has recently built up its Asia Pacific Team.

Social Media Content As well as its substantial paid-for content, Factiva also contains curated content from more than 1.6 million blogs, from more than 600,000 message boards and opinion and review sites, and from Twitter. Factiva also uploads hundreds of thousands of business- relevant tweets daily. These tweets are based around Factiva’s top 30+ industry categories, as well as the top 1,500 companies by revenue globally. Dow Jones has a team dedicated to identifying and adding Twitter handles relevant to those industries and companies. This helps ensure that the tweets are relevant and reliable.

Examples of Factiva’s sources are shown in Table 1.

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Table 1: Source Examples Type of Sources Examples Same-day and archival coverage of The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, The Times, the Guardian, Les Newspapers Echos, Börsen-Zeitung, South China Morning Post, The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, Straits Times, Yomiuri Shimbun HQ & Local Edition, The Irish Times and local newspapers from every corner of the globe. More than 450 continuously updating newswires, including the exclusive combination of Dow Jones, Reuters, and the Associated Press. Newswires Factiva offers more than 700 wires, including the Press Association, Agence France Presse, the Australian Associated Press and other industry press releases, and local newswires. General business and industry must-read publications such as The Magazines Economist, Forbes, Newsweek, Finanz & Wirtschaft, L'Express. Television BBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN, NPR, ABC (Australia), CTV, Deutsche and Radio Welle. Transcripts Source: Factiva website

The sources by language are listed in Table 2. Please note that whilst these figures are from 2012, we believe they still provide a good illustration of the diversity of Factiva’s sources.

Table 2: Sources by Language Language Sources Language Sources English 26,124 Hungarian 20 Arabic 243 Italian 385 Bahasa Indonesian 141 Japanese 476 Bahasa Melayu 25 Korean 231 Bulgarian 32 Norwegian 58 Catalan 41 Polish 72 Chinese (Simplified) 895 Portuguese 235 Chinese (Traditional) 494 Russian 1,876 Czech 55 Slovak 24 Danish 75 Spanish 1,214 Dutch 340 Swedish 82 Finnish 52 Thai 8 French 1,435 Turkish 43 German 1,090 Vietnamese 111 Source: FreePint Product Review of Factiva.com December 2012

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Storyful In December 2013, Factiva’s ultimate parent company News Corporation purchased social media news agency Storyful (not to be confused with the similar-sounding Storify).

Storyful’s strapline is “When everyone is sharing content, Storyful finds the stories worth telling”. The Storyful acquisition has given Factiva access to verified video content which it has added to its homepages. Factiva plans to make it searchable in 2015.

Author Database Another new source incorporated into Factiva is the author database. Key contact Figure 1: Example from details for journalists have now been captured. These can be exported into your Factiva’s new author contacts and added to lists. An example of the information on an author is shown in database Figure 1.

FreePint’s View: Sources, Content and Coverage Factiva is renowned for its news content and it maintains its edge here.

The addition of Storyful-verified videos and author databases are interesting moves and show that Factiva is not standing still on the content front.

The only content weakness from a UK perspective I can highlight is that the major business publication the Financial Times is not included in the standard subscription. In common with Factiva’s competitors, this source can be purchased directly from the newspaper itself and then accessed via Factiva.

ü Vast range of content – 32,000 sources in 28 ü Only database to offer the combined languages collection of licensed Dow Jones Newswires, The Wall Street Journal and Sources embrace social media as well as ü Reuters newswires traditional publications û Financial Times has to be subscribed to ü Thousands of sources not available on the directly, but this is an issue with all news free web databases.

This chapter is also published as an article in your FreePint Subscription: Factiva (Sources - Content & Coverage) Click to login now and read online »

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Technology With a heritage reaching back some 15 years, Factiva has steered a clever line between serving the traditional (but budget-challenged) market of information professionals and broadening its reach to tap the growing end-user market. This year has seen the introduction of many enhancements aimed at information professionals and end users.

The look and feel of the product has continued to keep up with the times and the current offering has a nice modern feel to it. It offers plenty of white space and the use of blue, black and grey lettering is easy on the eye. Recent enhancements have seen the use of more colours deployed in areas such as charting and this is highly effective. However, Factiva does not yet deploy hover boxes which provide additional information when you hover over a word or icon. I feel the offer of these would be helpful. It does deploy these effectively when hovering over news content on some pages.

Search and User Interface Once you have logged into Factiva and made your language selections, you are presented with a reassuringly straightforward screen. Prominent in the top right- hand corner is a green LIVE HELP button which opens up access to a direct messaging service with Factiva’s client helpdesk.

The black tabs along the top of the screen provide access to the product’s key functions: ƒƒ Home: the default screen when you login. It provides access to the simpler search tool with the rest of the screen customisable to display news, and intelligence from that news, in a variety of formats which can be tailored to user needs. ƒƒ Search: delivers access to the traditional Factiva search environment aimed at intense users such as information professionals and access to saved searches. ƒƒ Analytics: facilitates analysis of news trends and the creation of charts. ƒƒ Alerts: allows these to be viewed, set up and managed. ƒƒ News pages: provide access to three types of news pages which can be set up: Personal Pages, Group Pages and Factiva Pages. ƒƒ Company/Markets: selects the Companies & Markets module formerly sold separately as Companies & Executives. This module is now bundled in with Factiva as standard. Please see the FreePint separate review for more about this offering.

Homepage Search Adopting a deceptively simple approach, the search function looks like a regular web search box but this conceals some clever technology behind it. Typing in a word brings up a suggested list of companies, news subjects (popular terms, eg bribery), executives, regions and key words. The search can then be done using one of the terms or you can continue typing your own search words. This functionality is shown in Figure 2.

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Figure 2: Factiva’s search suggestions

As well as this option, searches can be refined by clicking the options button. This provides a means of defining the search more tightly in three ways: ƒƒ All sources can be selected, or one of five source categories can be selected: Dow Jones Newswires, Major News and Business Publications, Press Release Wires, Reuters Newswires, The Wall Street Journal. ƒƒ The time period can be selected from one of nine defined periods including all dates, the last three months and the last day. This is a small but useful piece of functionality which end users should appreciate and is ahead of the free web by a long way. ƒƒ The option to include additional blogs and boards. The option of Major News and Business Publications is a clever one and especially useful when researching an unfamiliar region.

Unlike Search Builder, this search function adds the word “and” in between phrases. For example, entering the phrase Walmart Bank will find articles with the words Walmart and Bank in them and produce a list of articles. Entering the same phrase in Search Builder will search for the entire phrase and correctly return no results. This is not a flaw but something to be aware of and makes perfect sense for casual users; Factiva provides two different search experiences aimed at different end users.

However, casual users used to entering approximate spellings in a search box may come unstuck as Factiva does not check your spelling. Entering cariers in a Google search will prompt a search for “carriers” and flag the spelling whilst Factiva will search unsuccessfully for “cariers”. I think it would be helpful if a spell-checker was introduced here. However, Factiva has developed a spell-check which currently surfaces only in Classic View on Homepage search. It plans to promote this functionality more obviously in 2015.

Once the search is conducted, Factiva clears the search screen and displays the results. Previous searches can swiftly be accessed and re-run by clicking the clock icon to the left of the search bar.

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What I found confusing was that if you performed a second search without returning to the home screen, the advanced filters (eg the company you were searching for) remained and were carried over to the next search. This would then look for occurrences of your new search time with your old search term, thus giving potentially incorrect results.

The search results can be presented in various ways:

The default view, shown in Figure 3, is known by Factiva as the Homepage search results. It places the search results in the middle of the screen with a headline and lead paragraph. On the left, the search results can be screened further by viewing them through a selection of filters: publications, web news, date, companies, sources, subjects, industries, language, regions and authors. What is great about these filters is that they display the number of search results in a graph and numerically so that the outcomes of a filter are known before it is applied.

Figure 3: Homepage search results

To the right of the search results is the related content. This consists of: ƒƒ A company snapshot displaying key financials if an indexed company was searched for. The snapshot is clickable through to more information on the company. ƒƒ Suggested reading, which is surfaced in some searches. Factiva told me that the aim here is to provide relevant industry content based on the most frequently occurring code in the results set. This is quite a clever idea but the results do vary in relevance between companies. For example, a search on Telefonica generated some related content on telecoms companies. A search on Thomas Cook generated content from the Transportation/Shipping sector which was a bit too broad whilst a search on Manchester City yielded stories on the Media/ Entertainment sector. ƒƒ Social Media. This displays the articles sourced from social media. I felt that this really fitted into the filters on the left-hand-side.

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I found the filters to the left of the search results quite useful. However, if you require more of the screen to be taken over by the results then you can choose to hide the filters. I did not find the results to the right of the news offered much benefit. The only useful content I found there was a snapshot of the company searched, which you can find through a hyperlink in the text anyway.

I put this point to Factiva. Factiva advised that the aim of the page is to show an instant snapshot of the whole subject area, without having to click on anything else. The information on the righthand side is designed to show the different types of content available to the users apart from traditional media (company data, suggested reading, social media, pictures, videos, etc.)

Homepage search results enables you to sort the articles by relevance, most recent or by the oldest. Relevance works by promoting articles where the keywords entered appear prominently and/or frequently. Factiva advised me that it is always looking at ways to improve the sort order to bring more relevant content to the top of the list.

Relevance also applies if you have rated sources higher or lower than neutral. In your results, locate a source in your results that you wish to rate higher or lower. Click the source name and a menu will appear. All sources start as neutral. You may select to rate it higher to boost it higher in your results or rate it lower to push it down in your results.

Articles can also be emailed, printed or saved. This can be done in both PDF or RTF (Word compatible) formats and there are three choices as to how much is downloaded: the headline only, the full article or the headline, article and table of contents.

The Classic View can be found by hovering over the icon next to the “Create an alert” button. The icon toggles between the two viewing formats.

Selecting the Classic View provides more space for the search results and ensures that only a narrow bar to the left of the results takes up screen real estate. The filters shown are date, companies, sources, subjects, industries, languages, regions, executives, authors, and keywords. It is also in the Classic View on Homepage search that the spellcheck functionality is surfaced. Figure 4 shows the Classic View.

The Classic View also opens up the options to add some of your results into a Factiva Workspace or Factiva Newsletter.

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Figure 4: Classic View

Custom Homepage In addition to the simple search, the homepage can be customised to display your alerts, news, and videos from Storyful. Analysis of news stories can be analysed by means of colour-coded graphs. An excerpt from a Homepage is shown in Figure 5.

The default modules are: ƒƒ Top news: displays hyperlinks to recent headlines, trending people, trending keywords, audio and video, trending companies and trending subjects. If US content is selected then it may also display a relevant share index graph. ƒƒ Newsstand: this displays the sections of key newspapers. You can select a tab to read the relevant news. This works best as a means to quickly read a selection of newspapers rather than to focus on particular industry news. ƒƒ News radar: graphically cross-tabulates news on subjects with industry players which can then be viewed by clicking. ƒƒ Custom topics: displays news under key headings selected by Factiva’s experts. The three headings chosen for the car or automobile industry on one day were: labour/ personnel issues, hybrid cars and product safety. ƒƒ Trends: this contains links to the top five company mentions based on news volume, the top five companies based on an increase in news volume and the top five based on a decrease in news volumes.

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Figure 5: Homepage showing the Storyful and Custom Topics modules

Further modules can be added: ƒƒ Storyful: trending videos based on 16 industry topics or 17 regions can be selected. ƒƒ Company: displays the information on a company including the latest news, a chart showing a news volume trend overlaid with the company’s stock price (if listed) and any available analyst reports. ƒƒ Charts: using saved searches, five charts can be added. These can be trend (volume of coverage for up to five searches), share of voice (volume or percentage of coverage for up to five searches), top sources (showing the top ten sources from each search), top authors (top ten authors for a search) and top subjects (top ten subjects for a search). There are also two/three chart views which can be selected for each category. An example of charts can be seen in Figure 6. ƒƒ Alerts: display personal alerts. This provides hyperlinked headlines to the news alerts you wish to display. ƒƒ RSS: displays the headlines from any RSS feed (internal or external) the user has added.

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Figure 6: Charts Module

All modules can be deleted. Multiple editions of the same modules can be incorporated on the same page, so that, for example you could have one set of alerts on supermarkets and another on banks. The order in which the modules appear can be altered. For example, you may want to put your alerts at the top of the page.

This is a really powerful page and it is one which end users should be able to do a lot of work on themselves to meet their needs. However, I found a couple of constraints in two of the modules which users should be aware of.

The Radar looks very powerful - on the Y axis are business issues and on the X axis a list of companies in the industry. News that occurs where the two meet is coloured in dark blue and is clickable to drill down to the articles themselves. The news items per company are neatly totalled up at the bottom. However, there were some instances where news was indicated as being present but on clicking through there were no articles present. Factiva’s helpful customer services desk investigated and they confirmed that whilst such articles were present, they were in another language.

I had selected that only English articles be searchable when I set up my Factiva account. I found this a bit confusing and would like to see this rethought. Perhaps either a different colour could be used to indicate articles in a non-selected language are available or the results amended to show zero results.

I also felt that whilst the radar looks neat, I think it would benefit from the ability to alter the list of companies being displayed.

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I really liked the Storyful concept with its ability to provide curated videos on key industries. However, these are indexed by only 16 industry sectors compared to the normal 34 Factiva industry sectors. This meant I was unable to display any appropriate videos on the motor industry which is an industry lending itself to this format.

I felt the tailoring of the modules could be simplified. Whilst you can select an industry or region, you cannot do both. To cross tabulate both fields, you have to go down to another set of boxes and look up the relevant filter. Dow Jones has said they’re aiming to provide more flexibility in creating homepages.

Search Page The search function is the place which most information professionals will head to. Clicking on the search tab brings up two self-explanatory tabs: search and search builder.

Searches can be conducted in several ways: 1. Free text search. This is the default option and the one which those experienced in using Factiva’s field tags will use. For example, using the field tag will search for an item in the headline or lead paragraph.

Factiva has recently developed a new feature called Query Genius which can be toggled on or off.

Query Genius helps searchers in three ways. Firstly, it displays a list of field tags at appropriate times. The user can then select the term required from the list. I found the suggested list of field tags really useful; whilst a lot of them are in my head as a long- time Factiva user, others like the date after function were really useful to be reminded about. See Figure 7 for an example of this in action.

Figure 7: Query Genius with a light background Secondly, Query Genius flags up a warning if the search terms used are invalid and also if a user has mismatched parenthesis or quotations. Thirdly, it makes good use of colour in a couple of ways. It offers the option to toggle between a light or dark search background. With both backgrounds, the text and codes are also given a range of colours to clarify what is entered. I found myself favouring the dark background. An example of the dark background is shown in Figure 8.

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Figure 8: Query Genius with a dark background

2. Search Form. This consists of four boxes; text can be entered into one or all of the boxes. The boxes are “All of these words”, “At least one of these words”, “None of these words” and “The exact phrase”.

3. Search History. This houses the last 20 searches which are retrieved in the original form in which they were entered: free text or search form.

One common feature of all these searches is that they can be further refined by Factiva’s intelligent indexing. This should be less necessary if you have entered a complex search.

Table 3: Factiva’s Intelligent Indexing Index Description Source Search by a specific source; create and use a list of sources to search in.

Search by a list of indexed authors. This is a new index. Whilst bylines could be searched previously, this is a far more Author robust way of identifying authors.

Company Search for a named company or create or reuse a list of companies.

This is a new area containing indexed terms under the headings of competitive intelligence, energy, news sentiment, Factiva Expert people search and reputation drivers. Factiva has clearly analysed what some of the key uses of the product are and Search developed the searches accordingly.

Search by using a varied range of subjects including Commodity/Financial Market News. These can be further drilled Subject down, for example content type lists 35 different types of content including rankings, interviews and letters.

Search in 17 broad sectors or in a sub, sub-sector. For example, radio broadcasting is a sub-sector of broadcasting Industry which in turn is a sub-sector of Factiva’s Media/Entertainment sector.

16 regions can be searched and can be drilled down to country level and then to key cities in those countries. Some Region regions are geographic and others are economic e.g. Developing Economies. Countries can appear in more than one list, e.g. Croatia is listed under EU countries, Balkan states and Central Eastern Europe.

A handy search box enabling free text to be looked up against the previous indexes: sources, authors, companies, Look up subjects, industries, regions and executives.

Language Choose the search language from a list of 28.

Provides a means other than using Factiva tags to search particular parts of the text e.g. full article, headline and lead More Options paragraph. It also allows specific types of news to be searched or not searched. In particular, it is very useful to readily exclude articles in some areas like market data and traffic reports.

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Factiva was keen to point out how the new Factiva Expert searches make Factiva a good tool for PR and compliance departments. For example, it is possible to search for negative news on a company and people can be searched against anti-corruption and money laundering.

It was very encouraging to see the considerable effort that has gone into enhancing this area of Factiva.

This chapter is also published as an article in your FreePint Subscription: Factiva (Technology - Search and User Interface) Click to login now and read online »

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The search results in Factiva are displayed in Factiva’s Classic View. Unlike the search on the Homepage, there is no option to toggle between the Classic View and Contemporary View but this to me is a sensible omission.

From the results screen, you may display the articles in several formats: ƒƒ Full article ƒƒ Keywords in context ƒƒ Full article/report plus indexing ƒƒ Headline, lead paragraph plus indexing ƒƒ Your own saveable formats, selecting any or all of 31 items to include. They can be sorted by most recent first, oldest first or most relevant first. Further filters can be applied using the filters to the left of the search results. The filters shown are date, companies, sources, subjects, industries, languages, regions, executives, authors, and keywords.

I am slightly disappointed that Factiva and its competitors still do not display all the graphs and tables that appear in printed newspapers. Factiva advises that where it has the agreements, it does bring them in. Given the increasing visualisation of news in newspapers, and Factiva’s incorporation of such devices for analysing and refining Factiva’s own search results, I hope that Factiva is able to gain agreements from more publishers. However, I was very pleased to learn that Factiva is seeking to provide tools to enable users to find articles with charts/graphs in them.

All or some of the articles can then be exported. Articles can also be emailed, printed or saved. This can be done in both PDF or RTF (Word compatible) formats and there are three choices as to how much is downloaded: the headline only; the full article; or the headline, article and table of contents.

Searches can also be saved as a Saved Search in order to be quickly run at a later date. Searches can also be saved as an Alert so the user can receive an email whenever new content matches their search queries.

Articles can also be shared in many other ways: ƒƒ Email This allows an article link in HTML or plain text to be sent to up to 100 email addresses from within the Factiva product. Recipients must have access to Factiva or Factiva Reader.

The reply-to email address can be changed which is useful for centralised information teams who may wish to use a generic email address instead of individual ones. ƒƒ Article Links These can be cut and pasted and shared with fellow subscribers. This might appear slightly clunky but is designed for those users who may require the full link so in practice will not be used by most users. ƒƒ Factiva Newsletter The Newsletter Builder, detailed later, allows a selection of news articles to be published in a custom branded magazine format. As well as external content, users can add their own content, for example comments, their own articles and web links.

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ƒƒ Factiva Widgets These facilitate the posting of news into a portal or intranet site. ƒƒ Factiva Workspace This is a storage area within the secure Factiva environment allowing each user to store search results in up to 25 workspaces containing a total of 100 items of content. Details of the content can be sent to fellow Factiva users. This is a good solution for storing multimedia content. ƒƒ Translation Individual articles can also be translated into any one of the languages supported by Google Translate using quick access to Google’s tool via an API. This does remove you from the Factiva environment, but the connection remains a secure one (HTTPS). IdealIy, I would have liked to have been able to translate a batch of articles whilst staying in the search results and to have been able to process those search results as I would regular articles. Although it does not directly address this issue, Factiva is thinking of ways in which it can open up content in its 28 languages to those users who are only able to use one language.

Factiva Analytics Factiva Analytics enables users to visually analyse news and research results. With Analytics, users can identify answers to research questions, track emerging news trends, or monitor company, brand or competitor news. Each chart allows users to drill into any interesting data point to read the underlying news coverage. Analytics was given its own top navigation tab in November 2014 but has been part of Factiva for two years. During this time of lower prominence, the tool has been steadily enhanced.

Factiva Analytics targets two initial audiences and will continue to expand to others: ƒƒ Information professionals. If an information professional receives a research request based on news, Factiva suggests that they deliver a brief that incorporates a visual analysis page to help visually tell the story of the research findings. ƒƒ PR and Communication professionals. These users can build charts that help analyse news coverage over time. They can use it to measure share of voice or follow volume trends over a period of time, for example following a product launch. They can use it to monitor which publications or journalists are covering them and it can help support an analysis of the PR department’s ROI. The Analytics tab opens up to two sub-tabs. My Analytics shows you your current analytics charts whilst Chart Builder allows you to build new analytics charts.

The basis of an analytics chart is one or more saved searches. From these, a variety of charts can be created: ƒƒ Trend, either as a linear chart or vertical bar chart ƒƒ Share of voice, as a pie chart, vertical line chart or horizontal line chart ƒƒ Top sources, as a vertical or horizontal line chart ƒƒ Top subject, as a vertical or horizontal line chart ƒƒ Top authors, as a vertical or horizontal line chart. The first two charts allow users to choose the chart colours; the final three have a fixed colour palette. Once a chart has been compiled, it can be used to surface the relevant news articles. The chart then appears at the top of a search screen. An example of a chart is shown in Figure 9.

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Figure 9: Factiva Analytics chart

Charts can also be copied in order that they can be modified to form different charts. Factiva conveniently labels the replica as a copy.

The chart itself can be downloaded as a large or small image in a graphics (PNG) format or the underlying data downloaded in a CSV, Excel-compatible spreadsheet. Charts can be shared with other users on your Factiva account.

I found this a really intuitive and powerful tool to use and can see it becoming a very popular feature of the product.

Factiva tells me that it is strongly committed to this functionality, so we can expect to see it developed further in the future.

Alerts Page The Alerts Page allows alerts to be viewed, managed and their URLs obtained via three sub-tabs. The tab you are most likely to use is the Manage Alerts tab which displays the alerts you have, and allows various elements of them to be tailored. See Figure 10 for an overview of the page.

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Figure 10: The Alerts Page, Manage Alerts function

There are four types of alert: ƒƒ Personal alerts - those alerts you set up yourself. This can be done from various pages including the Alerts Page itself, the Homepage, the Search page ƒƒ Subscribed group alerts - these are set up centrally by an administrator within the organisation. A user can view group alerts via their Manage Alerts tab and subscribe to those they want to. Group alerts can also be used to generate Factiva widgets which enable the display of news on compatible company intranets. ƒƒ Assigned group alerts - again these are set up centrally by an administrator within the organisation but the user has to receive them. For example, they could be news on a common pool of clients or perhaps key topics. ƒƒ Watch list alerts - these are created from within the Companies/Markets module, formerly the stand-alone Companies & Executives tool. For this reason, they cannot be displayed in the alerts section on the Homepage. For more details of the Companies & Executives module, please see FreePint’s review of Companies & Executives. Alerts are not just deliverable by email. They can also be displayed in a customised module on the Homepage, displayed via RSS, shared with colleagues and displayed on intranets via Factiva Alert Widgets.

There is an over-arching setting which sets up your time zone, email language and whether duplicate articles should be removed from alerts. This is particularly useful when newspapers share syndicated news stories.

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Individual alerts can be set up with the same degree of preciseness as news searches. Each Alert can also be tailored by different delivery options: ƒƒ Delivery times - continuously so as soon as a news item appears, or scheduled - one or all of early morning, morning or afternoon can be chosen. ƒƒ Sort Order - by date or relevance. ƒƒ Email format - HTML, HTML attachment, plain text, plain text attachment, mobile. ƒƒ Display format - headline with lead sentence, full text document, full text document with indexing. ƒƒ Maximum results per delivery (ranging from choices of 10 to 200 articles). ƒƒ Content - one or all of publications, web news, A-list blogs and additional blogs and boards. ƒƒ Bundling - up to 25 alerts can be bundled into one email so that users do not get overwhelmed by too many alerts. The alerts are a great feature of Factiva and a lot of thought has been put in to the customisation options. Whilst the many delivery options can be a bit daunting, Factiva has now added some useful information around the options although these do not automatically appear when hovering over the screen; an i button has to be clicked. With the delivery of alerts, I would also like to see the option of alerts displaying the relevant search terms and paragraph in which they appear in with the relevant words in bold. This approach has been adopted by Westlaw and removes the need for the recipient to open and read the entire article in case the search term arises elsewhere in the article.

News Page The news page tab opens up three sub-tabs: Personal Pages, Group Pages and Factiva Pages.

Personal Pages. These allow you to create your own news pages. You can start by having the page on your own topic or on one of the industries or topics. There are 26 Figure 11: Part of a industries and three topics - US Sports, the World and World Sports. Figure 11 shows Personal Page part of a Personal Page.

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You can set two columns, a narrow on the left and a wide column on the right. The narrow column can contain one or all the following options: ƒƒ Company - you can view information on a company here with a link which takes you into it. ƒƒ Company/Markets tab - or you can set up a list of companies to view information on. ƒƒ Quote list - this is my least favourite module. It’s a good idea but falls down in its implementation, which is probably an indication of the age of the module. To devise a quote list you first have to compile the list within the Companies/Markets page. This is no speedy matter as several tickers for each company have to be reviewed before the appropriate one is selected and added to a quotes list. ƒƒ Quotes - this links into the quotes page in the Companies/Markets page. Again, it’s a nice idea but the functionality is showing its age and is rather clunky. ƒƒ Saved search index - contains your saved searches. These can then be run from the page in the usual way removing the need to go to the Search page. ƒƒ Alerts index - an area in which your alerts can be displayed. Those alerts with a blue box indicate there are news articles available. ƒƒ Web resources - this lists useful weblinks. For example, under the heading of business tools, postal codes opens a third party website containing links to each country’s postal code websites. ƒƒ Top sources - this contains Factiva’s recommended sources if you have chosen one of Factiva’s higher-level industries or topics. ƒƒ The wide column can contain: ƒƒ Alert results - news on your alerts can be read, with results viewable by either publications, web news or blogs. ƒƒ Eur-Lex search - this provides a means of searching EU law and other documents. ƒƒ Newsstand - this is Factiva’s Newsstand as featured on the homepage but in a vertical format. Unlike the Homepage, the publications can be selected. From a UK perspective, having the choice of the BBC as a source is very useful. ƒƒ Search results - displays the search results of your saved searches. Clicking on the results takes you to the search page with the relevant search run. ƒƒ News - this provides Factiva’s recommended news stories if you have chosen one of Factiva’s higher-level industries or topics. The source categories can be refined e.g. if you choose telecommunications as your industry, you may select news from all or one of wireless telecommunications, wired telecommunications and telecommunications equipment. I liked the concept of the Personal Pages which enable you to easily organise and review your searches and alerts and keep on top of industry news. However, as indicated earlier, the clunkiness of the Quotes Module lets the page down. I was also slightly confused by the Eur-Lex Search as there was no indication as to what this source was. Apart from appearing as a publication in Factiva’s sources, it appears on no other Factiva pages.

Group Pages. These work as Personal Pages except they are created by an administrator at the client’s organisation. An administrator may create up to 100 Group Pages. The administrator then assigns the Group pages to relevant users, for example, a team focused on a particular industry or collection of clients. The administrator can also set the group news page to be the default setting in the News Pages screen for users.

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This is a sensible approach and probably reflects the fact that most of the pages will be set up centrally by an administrator anyway.

Factiva Pages. These are pages constructed by Factiva on industries and countries. There are some 73 pages which can be selected from a pull-down menu.

My default Factiva page opened for the United Kingdom. Most of the page is taken over by the Newsstand module. This enables key sections to be read from the Daily Telegraph, The Times, the Guardian, the Independent and The Wall Street Journal. Four sections on each newspaper are accessible from a drop-down menu - Business, Front Page, News and Sport.

What I liked about Newsstand was that articles can be saved or shared in the same manner as if they were conducted through a regular search. And articles in the news stand can be searched too. I can see this being particularly useful first thing in the morning if someone reads a great article whilst commuting and wants to quickly locate and share it when they arrive at their office.

The other modules on the page are:

Quote List. This displays the symbols of four indices, their values and the amount they have altered by. I didn’t find this module particularly helpful as Dow Jones tickers were used instead of the more familiar ones, eg xFST identifies the FTSE100. This situation would be more acceptable if a mouse-over indicated the full index name but this functionality is not in place.

Editor’s Links. This contains five hyperlinks: ƒƒ World News. This opens up a window to the results of an actual Factiva search on top news stories. ƒƒ BBC News; Sky Sports. These open up separate windows containing these popular websites. ƒƒ Today’s Front Pages. This opens up a separate window in Newseum, a website which contains images of 2,000 newspapers across the world. I had not come across this resource before which I found quite a novelty. ƒƒ Weather Underground. This links to an A-Z website listing the weather in the UK from Aberdaron to Yeovilton. I didn’t find it presented information particularly well and there are far better websites and applications for most people’s use.

Newsletter Function Current awareness is an important function of many corporate information teams. Newsletters are a great way of reducing multiple email alerts that may get lost in people’s inboxes and providing authoritative news.

The newsletter function in Factiva is powerful but not immediately apparent. It has not been given its own tab like the previous pages. Instead, the newsletter is available via what Factiva calls the gear icon which is in the top right-hand corner of the screen. It can be seen in Figure 11 above.

A newsletter can be built up in three stages and, before you build it, you can customise it extensively to fit in with your organisation’s branding. As Figure 12 shows, the customisation options here are extensive. You can also add in graphics, perhaps

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using your organisation’s brand and corporate images to give your newsletter an authoritative look. Charts, as shown earlier in this review, can also be imported into Newsletters.

Figure 12: Template Manager

Once you have devised your template or accepted the default template, you are free to go to the three stages of creating a newsletter.

Stage 1. Here you can select the Factiva news articles to place into your newsletter. The page is split in two with the pool of articles to select in the left-hand side and the articles selected in the right-hand column. The size of the columns can be altered. You get the articles in the left-hand column by exporting them from a Factiva search or by entering a search directly from the newsletter. As this is a basic search I imagine most people will just generate the article list from saved searches.

In addition to articles, the newsletter can be populated with different headings, internal and external web links, charts and your own content. Images or video content cannot currently be added.

Factiva articles may also be sorted by date order.

Stage 2. This is where you can format your email. You can choose the recipients and whether the newsletter is embedded in the email as plain text or HTML or sent as an attachment. If the latter, the attachment can be HTML, RTF (Word compatible) or PDF. You can also share your newsletter here via RSS or a Factiva Widget.

Stage 3. Here you can preview, review and then publish your newsletter.

The Newsletter functionality was further enhanced in October. To help those who send more than one newsletter a day, Factiva now displays the last published time as well as the date.

I found Newsletter Builder an intuitive, quick and enjoyable tool to use.

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Mobile Devices In common with its peers, there is no mobile app available. However, you can generate a link from Factiva which enables you to log into Factiva on a smart phone or tablet without the need to sign in each time.

End users who want a mobile-native app for quality business news have very few options today, the most robust of which is the Financial Times. Given the increase in consumption of news on mobile devices I would like to see Factiva introduce a mobile app aimed at the end user market. In a corporate market, getting lots of busy users to click on links and set up mobile bookmarks in a range of mobile devices can be a hard sell. However, Factiva does assure me that mobile is a key focus for it so we should look out for future developments in this area.

Customer Support For a complex product such as Factiva, good support both reactive and proactive is essential to enable users to enjoy all the features of the tool.

Factiva offers a wide range of training solutions which can be accessed by clicking on the gears icon and selecting Customer Service.

Some screens are directly linked to sources of further information e.g. the Factiva Pages screen has a hyperlink “Read Factiva Pages FAQs” but most pages do not. The new Query Genius function on the Search Builder page, The Newsletter Builder and Chart Builder all have an i-button which links to a guide on how to use the product but no other Factiva screens deploy this approach.

The i-button guide seems to be the way that Factiva is going to promote more contextual help, but the incomplete use of this tool at the moment is unhelpful. If Factiva can roll out the i-button approach on all the screens it should pay back handsomely by reducing queries to the helpdesk and create a far more self-sufficient product for the end user community.

The training solutions accessible via the Customer Service screen are: ƒƒ Real-time web sessions with live instructions. There are five web sessions here ranging from an introduction to Factiva to using the advanced search function. ƒƒ On-demand video tutorials. There are seven videos here on popular topics including more advanced videos on using intelligent indexing. I would like to see these moved across into YouTube, therefore simplifying matters. ƒƒ YouTube Video Tutorials. This is potentially a good range of short videos, each lasting a few minutes. They cover practical demonstrations on using Factiva, for example using Search Builder, Creating your Homepage.

There are two YouTube accounts: Factiva’s channel and Dow Jones. Both are live and Factiva itself links to the Factiva’s channel. However, Factiva’s channel is not being maintained and contains out-of-date videos. New videos are instead uploaded to the Dow Jones YouTube account. One site is not the repository for all videos so this important support area needs tidying up. ƒƒ Product Tips and professional guides. These contain two types of guide:

Product tips are PDF documents with plenty of screen shots. These come into their own when performing more complex processes like creating a newsletter. Some of the cards are available in languages other than English.

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As indicated earlier, I would like to see the appropriate guide accessible by a window from the relevant page on Factiva.

The other types of guides are professional guides. These are a set of eight factsheets on information topics written by industry veteran Jan Sykes and not Factiva specific. Topics range from the strategic “Mobile Content Strategy” to the practical “Risk Analysis: Opportunities for Knowledge Professionals”. ƒƒ Lunch and learn. These are conducted in person at either the client’s or Factiva’s offices. In my experience, they are a good solution for end users as they are tailored, interactive and provide training for busy executives who may never get round to self-learning. ƒƒ Online Instructor-Led Training. These are one-hour sessions timed to fit around the lunch hours in each region. The three courses available are titled “Introductory Factiva.com”, “Advanced (Inside Out) Factiva.com” and “Introductory Dow Jones Media Relations Manager”. The use of the old Factiva brand suggests this area needs a slight refresh. ƒƒ Glossary. An A-W glossary beginning where A is for abstract and ending at W for The Wall Street Journal.

In addition, a number of university libraries have placed short “how to” videos on You Tube. These are worth a look and benefit from an independent approach and come from a range of countries including Australia and France. However, they tend to focus on the more basic aspects.

Factiva also offers a range of customer support options. ƒƒ Live Help. At the top right-hand corner of every page there is a green Live Help button. This opens up into a dialogue box where you can interact with a Dow Jones representative. I had many contacts with representatives at different times. All were very helpful and on occasions emailed me with further information or rang me back to discuss matters. This service is available 24/7.

The only issue I had here was that if I navigated away from the screen to perform another task whilst the Factiva helpdesk reviewed my message eg to review emails, the dialogue box shrank down to fit on the tool bar and therefore needed to be located and re-enlarged to read the dialogue. ƒƒ E-Form. Accessible via the Customer Services page, Factiva will respond to every e-form within one hour. This is akin to email so is not as interactive as the Live Help. This service is available 24/7. ƒƒ Telephone. This service is available from 9pm Sunday until 1am Saturday GMT. There is no call back service which Factiva used to offer but for a corporate product I don’t see this as an issue. ƒƒ Searchable Help. This is a list of searchable questions and their answers. ƒƒ Top 10 Questions Asked. This displays the most frequently asked questions and Factiva’s answers. ƒƒ Content Watch. Details of the monthly changes in content sources. This can also be sent monthly by email.

Factiva also provides some other useful resources on this page: ƒƒ Ability to provide feedback. ƒƒ Delivery status of individual sources. ƒƒ Details of planned maintenance.

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Other areas accessible from the Gear icon include:

Account - where billing codes can be set up.

What’s New - details system enhancements and forthcoming webinars.

Settings - a comprehensive way to tailor the default settings of Factiva.

Lists - this is a really useful page with a broad range of sub-headings. ƒƒ List Editor. This enables lists to be edited or created on the following areas: Source, Author, Company, Subject, Industry, Region and RSS. ƒƒ Quote Lists. Provides a short cut through to the relevant Companies/Markets page to enable these to be set up. As I’ve mentioned before, this is a bit of a clunky process. ƒƒ Sources You’ve Rated. Enables these sources to be rated higher, lower or removed entirely from your ratings. ƒƒ Suggested Reading. This page provides suggested content to help users quickly understand an industry. It covers 31 industries and provides a selection of news, trend stories, analyses, commentary, profiles and overviews. Each industry sector has about 25- 30 items per week. It’s a real gem of a page and whilst somewhat buried away, the Suggested Reading topics are also searchable in Homepage and Search Builder.

FreePint’s View: Technology Factiva is an extremely powerful tool with a nice look and feel. It enables news to be searched, displayed and distributed in numerous ways. Its interfaces meet the needs of end users and information professionals alike.

Its recent investment in the development of Query Genius aimed at information professionals shows that this market is still of high importance.

Factiva has a first-rate helpdesk available through a readily identifiable green LIVE HELP button on every screen. It also provides a wide range of help guides but with the exception of Query Genius, accessing the appropriate guide for the screen you are on is a bit convoluted. Factiva’s help videos on YouTube are good but the company needs to sort out its YouTube accounts to ensure users can swiftly access the correct videos.

Once you have mastered it, Factiva is an easy tool to use, particularly the functions targeted at end users.

It is disappointing that there is no mobile app for Factiva but this is more of an industry issue than a specific Factiva one. However, Factiva does provide mobile optimisation and a web link that removes the need to login.

ü First-rate helpdesk easily accessible from û No direct screen links to the help guides every screen û Some videos out of date and some appear a ü Simple homepage aimed at end users does little out of focus not compromise the sophisticated screens û Clunky quotes screen and misleading Radar This chapter is also aimed at information professionals published as an article screen in your FreePint ü Wide range of support guides and videos Subscription: û No mobile app - but this is common to Factiva (Technology - other news aggregators too. Outputs, Analytics, Alerts, Help) Click to login now and read online »

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Factiva provides value to organisations in several ways.

It ensures that the widest range of global sources is searched. This means that if a news story has been published in a key source, you will know about it. This is particularly important given the fact that a lot of news stories are now behind paywalls and people are exercising their rights to be forgotten.

Purchasers of premium news databases like Factiva need to ask themselves the questions: ƒƒ What is the risk to their business without such information? ƒƒ What advantage will they hold over their competitors if they can utilise information from Factiva’s sources before it is more widely known? Thousands of Factiva’s sources are not on the free web.

It also ensures that content comes from trusted sources. With millions of blogs around, it can be a minefield knowing which to trust and which to steer clear of. Factiva takes this risk away.

Organisations also face the risk of breaching copyright laws by the illegal sharing of news and journal articles. Factiva helps reduce this risk by providing tools such as Factiva Reader which ensure copyright compliance.

In terms of security, Factiva also provides a secure environment for searching news. Can you say the same about searches conducted over the web?

Current awareness services which get the right news to the right person at the right time are a key function of many corporate information teams. Factiva provides tools that facilitate this process through the ability to devise sophisticated search criteria, the ability to set up alerts and by providing newsletter tools.

Finally, for those seeking news, Factiva is a real timesaver. All sources are housed on one platform so you don’t have to log into a wide range of different websites to conduct your searches. You can also fine tune your searches to get relevant results without having to read through all the articles you come across. Time is also saved by being able to link into hyperlinked company profiles without having to undertake separate searches. For end users, the ability to read news alerts on their mobile devices when commuting is a good timesaver.

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Figure 13: The combination of Factiva’s sophisticated search function and thousands of sources available through one interface saves a lot of time

Getting the right information to the right person at the right time is crucial and Factiva’s wide range of distribution methods encourage knowledge-sharing by making it quick and easy to achieve by means of its alerts, group alerts, newsletter and intranet widget.

Product Maturity and Development Plan Factiva is a mature product having been launched more than 15 years ago. During this time, the product has been steadily improved. Improvements have tended to offer additional functionality and simpler interfaces whilst retaining the traditional interfaces which users are familiar with.

Factiva states it has always valued user feedback in order to align product development with customer need. Future plans include enhancing core features (Search, Alerts and Newsletters) as well as adding better mobility options, introducing dynamic visual analytics and strengthening its company information.

Factiva will move onto a new platform in 2015 from MarkLogic. End users may not notice much of a difference but it will provide a robust service as the number of documents accessible through Factiva rises above a billion.

Content-wise, Factiva states that it remains focused on its core values of trusted, reliable, premium global content. Its focus at the moment lies in deepening its coverage of the major metropolitan areas of the world. The company cites video content as being important in the future.

Regarding platforms, Factiva has recently agreed deals with two mobile platforms. In October, Dow Jones signed a deal to make Factiva (and The Wall Street Journal)

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content available through the Evernote mobile platform. The arrangement will automatically surface articles from The Wall Street Journal and Factiva that relate to an Evernote subscriber’s work in progress.

And at the end of November, Dow Jones signed a deal with Flipboard. Wall Street Journal content was made available instantly and Factiva alerts for Factiva subscribers will also be made available by January 2015. Some Wall Street Journal content will be free to all Flipboard subscribers with Wall Street Journal subscribers able to access the full edition through the platform.

Readers interested in learning more about Flipboard and similar platforms should visit the FreePint article DIY Solutions: The Use of Social Media News Aggregation Tools in a Corporate Environment.

Competition and Alternative Offerings The closest competitor to Factiva is the LexisNexis news offering known as Nexis.com in the USA and Nexis in all other countries (FreePint review coming soon). Compared to Nexis, Factiva offers some unique content, for example the News Corporation titles such as The Sunday Times from the UK and The Wall Street Journal from the USA. Its deals with mobile platforms are currently unique as is its graphical, dynamically searchable display of news.

However, Nexis does offer more flexibility around purchasing; buyers have the option of buying access to all or just some of the sources. Pricing can also be on a flat rate or Pay As You Go. The latter is more suited to the self-employed or smaller entities.

Away from these two providers which appear each year on FreePint’s news survey as news products of choice, there is a big range of providers who offer a narrower range of sources. These include FirstRain, Newsdesk from Moreover which was recently acquired by LexisNexis, NewsEdge from Acquire Media, Silobreaker, and Westlaw from ThomsonReuters.

There is also a wide range of news aggregation tools available from outside the traditional providers. Readers interested in exploring the broad marketplace are recommended to take our article Market Map: the Options in News Aggregation & Beyond as a starting point.

Finally, there is also the option of using free sources and alerts such as Google Alerts.

Pricing Factiva is sold on a per-seat basis with the cost per seat decreasing dependent on the number of seats purchased. A seat also includes access to Companies & Executives, The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s.

Dow Jones also sells Factiva Reader seats which license corporate users to read news articles. These are substantially cheaper than full Factiva licences.

There are no regional variations available apart from an edition sold in China, called Factiva Economies, which is a version of Factiva with targeted financial news in China.

In line with the industry norm, pricepoints and actual prices are not disclosed.

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Value: FreePint’s View Factiva is a premium global news database which continues to improve upon its existing strengths of content and usability. For information departments and end users who value premium news, this will be an invaluable resource.

For this review, Internet Explorer 11.0.12 and Firefox 32.0.3 were used, both on Windows 7.

ü Provides access to 32,000 global resources ü News results can be searched and alerted searchable through one interface. This in many ways reducing the need for costly saves time in searching many platforms manual intervention once the parameters and reduces risk by ensuring that almost have been set up every avenue has been covered. ü Incorporation of former Companies & ü Thousands of the resources are not Executives module into Factiva may reduce available on the free web so would have need for subscription to other company to be purchased separately otherwise if databases required. And some content goes back to Investing in MarkLogic platform to ensure 1951, far further than some other free web ü stability and growth in content resources. ü Acknowledges the importance of mobile ü Social media is verified and trusted platforms through its alliances with ü Provides a safe and secure environment for Evernote and Flipboard searching news û Apart from Factiva Reader you may be ü Many time-saving resources including links paying for functionality and content that to company and executive profiles you may never use. ü Provides a range of tools to get the right news to the right people

This chapter is also published as an article in your FreePint Subscription: Factiva (Value - Competitors, Development & Pricing) Click to login now and read online »

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Ready to research products and services that will help your organisation manage news sources? Start here.

From the FreePint Buyer’s Guide, in the News category:

Featured Featured CRUSH Executive Profiles Orbis CRUSH Executive Profiles deliver deep-dive insights into Orbis contains comprehensive information on companies the Fortune 500 C-Level executives’ business & personal worldwide. You can use it to research individual companies, backgrounds. Uncover past, present and future business search for companies by profile and create your own analyses. initiatives they’re focused on and align your messaging and value propositions accordingly. The information in the CRUSH Read more Executive Profiles will help you to build better strategic account plans and more effective target-account-based marketing initiatives. http://www.avention.com/products/crush-executive-profiles/ Featured Featured M-Adaptive iSell M-Adaptive is a SaaS tool for PR and media professionals to OneSource iSell transforms sales by understanding the ideal monitor and report on mentions of companies, brands and other targets for each sales professional and then continuously keywords in both the editorial and social media digital landscape. delivering the most timely and relevant opportunities personalized by their profile. With iSell, sales professionals can Read more focus their efforts where there is the greatest opportunity, resulting in greater revenue and improved sales productivity. http://www.avention.com/products/isell/

Featured Featured Lexis Diligence M-Express Lexis® Diligence helps you protect your organisation and its M-Express is a media monitoring service providing snippets of corporate reputation with cost-effective due diligence checks news containing chosen keywords and phrases from selected and ongoing monitoring. In a single search, you can access all sources. the intelligence you need to vet existing, future and ongoing relationships. Read more http://www.lexisnexisrisk.co.uk/lexis-diligence.php

Featured Featured M-Update LexisNexis Company Dossier M-Update is a customised reporting service predominantly for Company Dossier brings together global company data, B2B clients providing news abstracts from selected digital news executive information and news information from multiple sources, blogs and forums. Grouped by topic and written by providers to create easy-to-use reports for business professionals. M-Brain analysts, there are options for additional analysis of Particularly useful for those in business development, competitor sentiment, context etc. intelligence or customer management roles. Read more Read more

Use the FreePint Buyer’s Guide to find products by vendor, category, or run a search.

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Featured Featured Northern Light Business News SinglePoint Northern Light Business News is a comprehensive source of SinglePoint customized strategic research portals integrating all online industry and technology news, business newswires, and of company’s internal and external research sources. industry authority blogs featuring text analytics optimized for strategic business analysis. http://northernlight.com/singlepoint/

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Featured Featured The Monitor Northern Light Discovery Portal for Life The Christian Science Monitor is an international news organisation that delivers global news via the website, mobile Sciences Conference Abstracts site, weekly digital edition, digital app, weekly print magazine, Daily News Briefing and email newsletters. Northern Light’s Discovery™ Portal for Life Sciences provides a http://northernlight.com/singlepoint/ searchable full-text index of over 900,000 abstracts and posters from over 1,000 life sciences conferences.

http://northernlight.com/discovery-portals/

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Product Review of Nexis Review published November 2013: http://web.freepint.com/go/sub/report/2279

ü An impressive range of quality content – news, company, ü Relevant to a variety of roles within an organisation with industry, biographical, country multiple applications ü Global support network ü Extensive online help and good customer service ü Dedicated search interfaces for specialised content ü/û Improved search results page which could still be easier to read ü Updated news search form making it appealing to both novice and power users ü/û Add-ons such as Media Analyser and Company Dossier provide additional functionality but I’d like to see them as standard.

Product Review of NewsEdge.com Review published October 2014: http://web.freepint.com/go/sub/report/2408

ü Clear focus on business sources ü Fabulous array of distribution options ü Coverage of many big-name business publications ü Extensive proprietary taxonomy ü Good drill-down by source type ü Copious help tips and documentation, plus email and telephone support ü Ability to focus very quickly on focused subsets of licensed or web content û Relatively limited numbers of sources for some countries and languages ü Extensive content archive û Taxonomy-based search results sometimes less extensive for ü Wide range of languages supported non-English-language content ü Wide range of search options, suiting different user types û User interface a little cluttered in places.

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Andrew is the owner of Research Counts Ltd which provides training and support to corporate information teams.

He began his information career at the business support agency Business Link, in London. He then joined the UK’s sixth largest accountancy firm, BDO, where he worked for 11 years. His work there spanned competitive intelligence, vendor management and research and analysis.

More details about Research Counts can be found at www.researchcounts.com.

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