Articulate Presenter ’09: Conversation with Mark Schwartz

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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    Mark Schwartz is the executive vice president for sales and marketing at Articulate. In this role, he has worldwide sales responsibility for Articulate leading the direct sales and channel management teams as well as all product marketing activities. Prior to joining Articulate, Mark spent 20 years in sales and sales management roles with IBM and Dell.

In this discussion, Mark discusses the new Articulate Presenter ’09 product.

Geetesh: Articulate Presenter is already such a full-featured program. What did you add to version ’09 to make it better?

Mark: We’re really proud of the great job our engineering team did in improving upon Articulate Presenter. I’ve had an opportunity to demonstrate Presenter ’09 at several trade shows already. The feedback that I’ve received has been extremely positive. The features that seem to receive the most acclaim include: the ability to add annotations to the course, preview publish options, improved image fidelity, branching support, notes formatting, mobile support, and PowerPoint 2007 ribbon interface and new feature support (such as SmartArt).

Geetesh: Mark, tell us more about the support infrastructure in place for Articulate Presenter, and your other products.

Mark: According to our own and independent third-party research, Articulate continues to receive very high marks in support. We recently won a Top 10 Best Web Support Site for the second year in a row. We offer free web-based support, and we work hard at providing a comprehensive self-service support site that solves most customer problems almost instantaneously. Should a customer need to open a case, we are able to respond to over 90% of our cases within an hour.

Our community forums, which are a critical element of our support offerings now has over 32,000 active members. We actively monitor and respond to customer threads and our customer base also does a great job responding to other customers in need. We truly have a very helpful and amazingly intelligent user community. I believe this is paramount to our success.

Our support site includes over 90 web-based tutorials to get customers up to speed on our products. Should customers desire customized training from us, we offer web-based and instructor-led training sessions.

We offer an enhanced, fee-based support option–the Platinum Membership Plan (PMP) which provides a free Software Developers Kit, chat support, and pre-paid, discounted version upgrades.

Finally, we offer fee-based incident phone support that includes a web conference component where we can take over the user’s computer if that would prove beneficial and if we are granted access.

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