Regular IntelliConenct users may have noticed a few changes over the past few weeks.  While most folks were away on holiday over the new year, the IntelliConnect team were busy adding some new features.  Here’s a look at what they were up to:

Search Results

Scanning through a list of search results is now easier thanks to the inclusion of source details in the title of each result.  Here’s a quick summary of the changes:

• - Legislation results now displays the title of the Act
• - Rulings and releases display the issuing body and the issue date
• - Case results now display the citation, court and date of the judgment
• - Commentary, news and other secondary sources now display the title of the publication

IntelliConnect's new-look search results

Printing for Court

PDF reproductions of printed case reports are now available for online case reports.  Most cases from 2009 have court-ready versions, and all cases from 2010 onwards will also have this option. CCH is also looking into progressively adding Print PDFs for older cases.

To print a case for court, simply go to the full text of the case you are looking for and click on the “Print PDF” link that appears under the party name. A PDF reproduction of the print version will open in a new window.

Printing the "print" version of a case

Printing via the “Print Menu” will continue to provide an online version of the document for printing, rather than the court-ready version.

You may notice that very recent cases may not have a “Print PDF” option yet. That is because we update the online product faster than the print version – and we can’t reproduce a print version of the case until we’ve actually printed it! The links are added once the print update is published.

One of the great things about IntelliConnect is that we will be continually upgrading it and adding features according to what our customers want.  Be sure to keep an eye out here for more IntelliConnect news in the future.

While most of us enjoyed some time off over Christmas and New Year a small team of dedicated editors, production and procurement staff, customer service managers and printers were working hard on the CCH end of year book program.

The book program is an intensive period where annual and first editions of most of our key titles are edited, produced, printed and distributed in time for the start of university semesters. Planning starts in mid-August and the program ends in February. Dedicated teams work exclusively on the book program and it is always both demanding and rewarding.

Getting the books written and edited on time is the first challenge. Our authors and editors manage to do this every year but there are more than a few late nights and stressful moments. The next step is to ensure that the right titles are ready for the right universities and orders are fulfilled correctly. The university term start dates range  from the 15 February to the 1st March and dispatch has to be prioritized accordingly. What can increase the complexity is the communication between CCH, the printer and the bookshops – we talk a different language at times!  We use an internal code for each book, the printer uses a reference number and the bookshops use the ISBN. Luckily this is not a problem when you have such experienced coordinators as Merilyn Murphy and Sue Rooker: Merilyn has been with CCH for over 20 years and Sue has been CCH’s Relationship Manager at Macpherson’s Printing Group for over a decade. Merilyn and Sue are an integral part of ensuring the book program always goes to plan and so far it always has.

To give you an idea of the size of the book program, in 2009 we printed 240, 000, 000 pages and it will be even more this year. To take a look at the latest 2010 titles just click here.

The Salvation Army Raffle is a staple of the CCH festive calendar, right up there with the annual Christmas party and the masses of tinsel festooning team areas.

“It’s a great tradition here at CCH” says long-time organiser of the raffle, Graham Clayton. “It’s been going at least 10 years”, he guesses, scratching his head. It’s probably been going a bit more than that.

Community spirit is at the heart of this event, with employees from all areas of the company teaming up to donate prizes, sell tickets and scrunch up the ticket stubs for the draw itself. CEO Dave Lampert is a passionate supporter of the raffle and can be seen selling tickets every year at the staff Christmas party.

Prize lists are studied carefully – this year’s winner had the difficult choice of deciding between an Apple Iphone and an Amazon Kindle, along with a dozen other fabulous prizes.

Graham says the real reason for the event is not the prizes, but the donation of all proceeds to the Salvation Army.

In a typical week, The Salvation Army in Australia provides people in need with an estimated 100,000 meals. It provides beds to 5,000 homeless people, rehabilitation to 500 addicted and refuge to 400 victims of domestic abuse. It also provides counselling to several thousand people.

Each year the CCH Salvo Raffle raises thousands of dollars, and the company matches the amount raised by the staff. Graham and the CCH team are proud to announce that this year’s donation to the Salvation Army will total approximately $5660.

We recently held our second Innovation Cafe at CCH.  Once every six weeks we conduct a coffee, croissants and creativity session in the CCH Australia office in Sydney. All staff are invited and those who are interested come along to participate in a creativity-boosting workshop or to hear an external speaker. Last week we invited along Dr Jeffrey Tobias, the Managing Director of The Strategy Group, to talk to us about Open Innovation. Dr Tobias has extensive experience in innovation, including being global lead for innovation in the Innovations team in the Internet Business Solutions Group in Cisco Systems.

Using examples from a range of companies and industries – including Cisco, Proctor & Gamble and Pepsi – Dr Tobias explained that Open Innovation involved creating an innovation ecosystem that extends beyond the four walls of your office to include customers, suppliers and partners. Effective innovation doesn’t mean that you have an isolated R&D or engineering team coming up with new ideas in perfect isolation. Instead, companies need to engage with all internal and external stakeholders to maximise idea generation and execution.

After hearing about Open Innovation, we then spent some time with Dr Tobias discussing how we could use Open Innovation concepts to improve innovation at CCH. Our program had already started opening up innovation to all staff at CCH but could we do more to include suppliers and customers? What would be an effective way to do this? Dr Tobias gave us plenty of food for thought and it was a very worthwhile morning.

And as luck would have it, two days later we met with representatives of Lonely Planet, the travel publisher, who it turned out were implementing their own Open Innovation model. We had a great discussion with them about the challenges both our companies face in today’s dynamic publishing market, and talked about ideas and strategies for maximising our respective opportunities.

Next step: engage in Open Innovation with our customers. We have plenty of ideas of how we can do this so I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

Accurate. Authoritative. Relevant. At CCH, we say we are but how do we know if this is really true?

Simple - ask our customers!

Since 2006, CCH has surveyed customers across the Asia Pacific region in order to find out what they think about our products and associated services, as well as their perception of CCH in general. By regularly surveying our customers, we aim to develop and deliver high quality products and services which best meet our customers’ needs.

Customers are invited via email to complete an online survey where they firstly rate a chosen CCH product type on a range of factors, including accuracy, ease of use and relevance. They are then asked to rate this product type on overall quality, price and value for money.

Next, our customers are asked about how likely they would be to continue to use our products, recommend them to a colleague and how much they trust and rely on the products. A customer’s likelihood to recommend a product to a colleague tells us two key things: how loyal they are to us as a brand and how enthusiastic they are about our products and services. For example, a customer who said they would be “highly likely” to refer a CCH product to a colleague would also be likely to continue to buy our products for themselves. Understanding these responses ultimately allows us to see our products and services as our customers see them – an extremely valuable insight indeed. 

The results from this survey are shared through our Executive Group and management teams who use this information to better understand what customers think of us. Over the past three years of conducting this survey, we have been able to look at trends in customers’ opinions and use these to identify areas where we can plan strategies to improve in the future.

To thank our customers for taking the time to complete this survey, we donate $5.00 to a charity of their choice. This year, our customers could choose to make a donation to World Vision, Médecins Sans Frontières or the World Wildlife Fund. We raised over $3,300.00 for these three charities – so a big thank you is in order to all of our customers who took the time to complete this survey!