We were recently asked via our Twitter account what is CCH Australia doing with mobile applications?

Here’s our response:

Q - What mobile applications/interfaces do you currently have now or in development?

CCH - We have just launched an individual tax rate calculator at the Apple iTunes store. Next, we’re exploring a newsreader for the CCH Tracker products (email news alerts) and other news. We hope to incorporate text-to-speech in certain apps as well, allowing users to mark stories to be read out loud.

Q - What type of content would CCH see as appropriate for the mobile market? (i.e. the whole of the CCH library or certain subsets?)

CCH - Currently we’re open to trying all content types. We’re talking with customers to understand their needs and workflow.

Q - Are there any issues encountered in developing these, either in the interests of the market or technologically?

CCH - Our online platform IntelliConnect is currently compatible with IE8, IE7 and IE6 and works reasonably well on Firefox. We continue to work with our customers to understand how and where they are using the information in order to add appropriate device and delivery channels.

Q - Are the applications/interfaces being developed for a specific device (e.g. iPhone/iPad, Blackberry) or is a multi-device approach being taken?

CCH – We’re currently developing for specific devices our customers tell us are important to their work.

Q - Have copyright/digital rights management issues played a part in the development of these products?

CCH - Yes. As with all publishers, we respect our authors’ intellectual property, while attempting to meaningfully deliver content to the customer. It’s an important balance, and we’re keeping a close eye on the trends in the industry and new DRM advancements that afford us the best outcomes.

Ever wondered what other people are searching for on IntelliConnect?

Is there something I’m missing?

Is there a particular search term that will reveal the answer to life, the universe and everything?

Never fear, all is revealed below with a list of the top 100 search terms in IntelliConnect this week:

Top 100 search terms in IntelliConnect (week ending 28 May 2010):

1. fbt
2. Division 7A
3. insurance
4. depreciation
5. GST
6. margin scheme
7. superannuation
8. investment allowance
9. debt forgiveness
10. Living away from home allowance
11. non-commercial losses
12. Depreciation rates
13. permanent establishment
14. managed investment trust
15. Capital Gains Tax
16. commercial debt forgiveness
17. finance lease
18. lease
19. car parking fringe benefit
20. rental property
21. stamp duty
22. annual leave
23. residency
24. long service leave
25. redundancy
26. relocation
27. motor vehicle expenses
28. depreciation rates 2010
29. effective life table
30. interest
31. otherwise deductible
32. bamford
33. caveat
34. directors
35. low income tax offset
36. payroll tax
37. minor benefit
38. small business cgt concessions
39. indemnity
40. capital works
41. resident
42. effective life
43. reportable fringe benefits
44. main residence
45. employee share scheme
46. fringe benefits tax
47. retirement exemption
48. minors
49. active asset
50. going concern
51. family law
52. cost base
53. TOFA
54. Trading stock
55. trust
56. sexual harassment
57. share buy-back
58. superannuation guarantee
59. Entertainment industry expenses
60. insider trading
61. trust losses
62. withholding tax
63. income
64. family trust election
65. penalties
66. allowance
67. partnership
68. salary sacrifice
69. thin capitalisation
70. education tax refund
71. Liquidation
72. interest deductibility
73. property
74. Condition of release
75. car parking benefit
76. assessable income
77. superannuation contributions
78. gifts
79. director
80. incurred
81. car parking
82. 40-880
83. personal services income
84. employee share schemes
85. tax rates
86. software
87. reportable fringe benefit
88. “consequential loss”
89. cabcharge gst
90. work test
91. base value
92. car
93. “section 45″
94. distributable surplus
95. deduction
96. ACL_HANDLE ca4-s.48AA
97. “work test”
98. foreign losses
99. principal place of residence
100. ohs

Last month was a whirlwind tour de force for the Major Accounts team: with CCH Connect afternoon soirees on 28 and 29 April, held in Sydney and then in Melbourne.

The purpose of CCH Connect was not only a chance for CCH to showcase our recent innovations, but also to provide our customers with an opportunity to share their experiences with us and each other.

It was also a great opportunity for our clients to meet the brains of the organisation: the editors who were present, Tracker Project Manager Chris Taylor, Content Roadmap Project Manager, Shaun Weston and iSolutions Director, David Gustavsson and many others.

Attendance was high in both cities. The necessary factors for a successful soiree were present - the cold weather provided the necessary element to enjoy Devonshire tea, the excitement about “what next” from CCH and most significantly, the warmth and interest that I observe extending from our clients to my colleagues.

Sentiments aside, the day certainly provided “WOW!” moments during the iSolutions segment.

One customer in Sydney said, “I certainly liked how the screens went BOING! How did they do that?”

And another in Melbourne said, “Will IntelliConnect have the SWOOSH effect? That makes the interface so interesting!”

I certainly felt like a popular debutante with a calling card at the end of the event: with numerous requests from my clients to set up roundtable discussions with the iSolutions team, requests of “don’t forget to put my name down for Fair Work Act Partner” and “don’t forget me about Henry Review”.

Note to self: customers have asked that margaritas be included in the next soiree!

CCH Australia’s new IntelliConnect platform has been a fantastic success and with its intuitive functionality, many of our customers have felt pretty confident about finding what they need from day one.

Such has been the interest, though, increasing numbers of users seem to want to drill deeper into all its great workflow tools and really understand the tremendous cost saving efficiencies it provides.

One of our key focuses in 2010, therefore, is to reinforce this at every available opportunity and make sure that all those who receive our training come away with a feeling that their investment in our products is “money well spent”

Whether at the ALLA conference or at any of the hundreds of IntelliConnect training presentations the team has delivered, our new platform has been enthusiastically received.

Almost all have immediately grasped its intuitive nature and leapt at the breakthroughs it represents for their research and workflow.

People are starting to use IntelliConnect in ways that we never imagined, and that surprised and delighted us.

Indeed end users have helped us re-define our training, and have contributed greatly to the ongoing development of both the platform and our help resources.

Over the last six months of 2009 the training team travelled all over Australia delivering more than 600 training sessions to more than 4000 individuals.

In fact, a total of 4304 people had been trained on IntelliConnect by the end of the year.

They travelled 65,000km delivering 326 onsite sessions and conducted over 250 online sessions and 34 public seminars.

As well as this all our major accounts received national roll out training.

The overwhelming feedback has been that of tremendous excitement at the possibilities IntelliConnect presents our users.

Here’s some feedback:

 “As Regional Tax Manager (Asia Pacific), it is of the utmost importance for me to have an up to date and reliable tax research tool. I have found the new CCH IntelliConnect platform to be most intuitive to use and the search results have been distinctly relevant, up to date and extremely well categorised. The convenience of being able to filter by jurisdiction and by document enables me to find what I need extremely fast.  I also find the research folder option with note taking function very useful.” — Zoran Havranek, Regional Tax Manager (Asia Pacific), Goodyear & Dunlop Tyres Australia Pty Ltd

“Impressive. Very detailed - seems to have thought of everything. Like the folder set up to filter lists.” — Linda Simonis - Downings Legal

“We have found CCH products to be second to none and easy to search through.” — M. Murphy OHS & QA Manager - Mutual Cleaning & Maintenance Pty Ltd

“IntelliConnect™ appears very well thought out and considers a lot of issues that researchers may have.” — Virginia Ung - RSM Bird Cameron

“Very user friendly and straight forward. Browser windows are comfortably familiar and alike to other commonly used interfaces.” — Caitlyn Good - Elphinstone Stevens

The CCH training survey made all the hard work worthwhile with great feedback from our customers: 

• 78.5% of respondents trained on IntelliConnect™ found that it provided them with everything required to effectively use the platform
• 66.2% of respondents agreed that the training provided assisted greatly with effectively using IntelliConnect ™

Of those who utilized training:

• 44.5% used face to face training
• 41.4% used Live Online training
• 22.5% used flash tutorials

The training team is pleased to release our first round of CCH National Customer Training seminars for 2010.

These dates are now on www.cch.com.au and all our clients are welcome to book in through the site.

Below is the direct link to the registration page. Remember all our clients are welcome to have as many users as they please and the seminars are complimentary: http://www.cch.com.au/au/Training/MinisitePages/Public-Seminars.aspx

Your training team

The training team welcomes a new team manager: Jonathan Taylor.

Jonathan has been with CCH for 23 years in June and started out as an Account Manager in the South Eastern suburbs of Melbourne in 1987. During his time at CCH he has had many roles within Sales at state regional and national levels.

In his new role as Sales Development Manager he will have much more of training and support focus and he is really looking forward to using some of his experience in the business to help the Customer Training department deliver even greater value to CCH customers.

Kylie Dugan oversees customer training for New South Wales, Queensland and the ACT. Having come into the role of CCH Trainer from a Major Account Manager in 2009, Kylie has been able to build on her existing relationships in this tier as well as develop many new ones.

James Eade coordinates customer training for Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory. James joined CCH as a trainer in 2007. He comes from a background In Major Accounts and Project Management in the financial, telecommunications, education and government sectors.

Contact us at - custtraining@cch.com.au

For Live Online training go to: http://www.cch.com.au/liveonlinetraining

Recently we blogged about a new feature on IntelliConnect, PDF reproductions of printed case reports.  Since then a few of our customers have asked for more information on the feature, in particular whether older cases will have the option added to them. 

The official word from our Editors In Chief is that contingent on current web deadlines being met, we aim to have the PDF versions of the following in IntelliConnect by the end of April:

• Australian Tax Cases 2004 – 2008
• Australian Company Law Cases 2004 – 2008
• Australian Family Law Case 2004 – 2008

We will then assess usage of and customer feedback on the Print to PDF function before scheduling further development.

Another new feature that has sparked interest is the “last reviewed” date.  This datestamp appears at the top of a paragraph of commentary and indicates when that particular paragraph was last reviewed. 

Several customers have expressed interest in how this works.  Does it apply to individual paragraphs or complete chapters?  When will “last reviewed” dates be available for all content?  Our legal Editor In Chief Peter Rodrigues provided the following explanation of the “last reviewed” date.

The date is updated when we have reviewed the paragraph for currency and either changed the substantive content of the paragraph because a change was necessary, or decided that it does not need changing.

Our goal is to update our content as closely as possible to developments occurring. This means that there are times where an external author or CCH writer will update specific CCH paragraphs, because a development has only impacted those paragraphs. They will then update the last reviewed date for those particular paragraphs. There may, therefore, be instances where it has only been necessary to update a particular CCH paragraph and its relevant last reviewed date. Where the author or writer has reviewed the content of paragraphs surrounding those that they have actually updated, they will update the last reviewed date accordingly.

External authors and CCH writers also review entire chapters or sub-chapters in one go to ensure that the entire content of that chunk of content is up to date. In those circumstances, the last reviewed date is amended for every CCH paragraph within that sub-chapter or chapter.

The “last reviewed” date that is displayed is dependent on a field of metadata being updated by an editor/writer. Because we have only recently made it compulsory for an editor to update this field, some of our content may currently have a date that indicates it was last reviewed quite a long time ago, even though that content may have been reviewed more recently. It is also possible that some commentary content will have no last reviewed date at all because this metadata field has not been completed.

We are in the process of updating all our last reviewed dates so that they do accurately reflect when we last reviewed the content. As we have a lot of content this process will take some time.

There are more feature updates planned for IntelliConnect in the months to come, so watch this space or contact your CCH representative for more details.