Élan

Pros: I like when we hire new users, the training is minimal as the system is easy to navigate and understandable

Cons: I dislike the Help section..it's not up to date nor easy to search through. Often times I will search and the results bring back nothing. It's not very intuitive.

Overall: It assists with making my job easier to accommodate advertising clients and internal management.

Pros: It had a nice look and feel and the dashboards were laid out well and informative.

Cons: Newscycles lacked support for their product and had little knowledge of their own database. Their ability to import data into their own database took days and several failures with import after a week incomplete and they could describe what they were missing. No data dictionary between the Elan and previous products. The API they use to pull data from the JSON DB is cumbersome and limiting and there is no assistance from Newscycle. Since it is Saas, the customer is limited by what Newscycle can provide.

Overall: The biggest problem I encountered was Newscycle's inability to get the sand box populated and available. The inability to get the sandbox up and available fully populated with data seemed to be beyond Newscycle's abilities and the subsequent failure of NC to provide documentation and an accurate data dictionary and after spending weeks attempting to complete the data mapping to the ancillary interfaces NC announced they incorrectly imported the data incorrectly so hundreds of hours were wasted due to their incompetency. Routine failures to meet completion dates and failure to follow up when they failed to meet a date.

Pros: We love that it is concentrated for Publishers and our needs. Having royalties done automatically at the end of every posting day is a huge burden off of us.

Cons: It has a little bit more of a learning curve than we anticipated it having. To fix problems you are fairly dependent on support to get them fixed.

Comments: The implementation and conversion process we experienced from Cispub to Elan was the best conversion process that I have experienced having gone through 5 separate conversions in the past 20 years. The MSG staff have been outstanding in their response to our specific needs. Overall I could not have asked for better results.