For institutional investors, making their voices heard on corporate governance matters among scores, sometimes hundreds, of stock holdings can be extremely cumbersome and complex. RiskMetrics Group offers a proxy voting service to help its clients—banks, hedge funds, asset managers, insurance companies, mutual funds, and pension funds—cast ballots, keep track of votes, and maintain records.
When RiskMetrics was preparing to roll out a new proxy voting system, it had concerns about transitioning all of its clients to a new platform that offered a lot more functionality with a much different look-and-feel than the existing system. Of particular concern was how to provide help documentation and training.
To prepare both internal and external users for the switch, the company planned to offer extensive written guides, case studies, and training videos. With the company’s IS department already having a full docket, RiskMetrics needed a platform to provide these features that didn’t require much technical know-how.
“We evaluated several approaches,” says Kirk Shulman, Senior Project Manager with RiskMetrics. “Since our platform was still under development, we wanted a system that could be edited by multiple users and be updated rapidly.”
RiskMetrics uses Adobe’s RoboHelp for some similar applications, but that product has limitations. “It is a very closed-system that can get outdated quickly,” Shulman says. “A wiki seemed like the way to go, but it had to have different views into the Help Portal for administrators, internal users, and clients.”
Although RiskMetrics kicked the tires on some free EditMe competitors, none measured up. “We felt EditMe was worth the fee since it seemed a lot more polished and easier to set up,” Shulman says. “Getting started with EditMe was very easy. It only took about a day for me to get a handle on how it works and start creating help pages.” Shulman was impressed with EditMe’s platform and features during development.
“EditMe is very well thought out, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that some features I didn’t think to implement at the start (user-access control for instance) were easy to integrate,” he says. “I was also pleased to see how well EditMe handled multiple content types — Word, Excel, PDF, even Flash video files.”
When technical challenges stumped RiskMetric’s development team, EditMe’s staff delivered assistance promptly. “Close to launch, the testing team found a few interface issues that required changes to the page code to fix,” Shulman says. “Since I’m not a developer, and our development resources were fairly maxed out, this could have presented a large problem. I was very pleased with how quickly and professionally the EditMe service team implemented the changes.”
Since its launch, the EditMe-based solution has been the robust help tool that Shulman envisioned. “For our internal staff and clients the Help Portal has become the primary source of information about the platform,” Shulman says. “For web-based solutions, EditMe is the best choice for interactive help documentation.”
