Press Releases

Participative Web within your Firewall

West Lafayette, IN. Aug 4th, 2010 – Web 2.0 meets the Enterprise in the latest release of portal software v4.6 by Passageways. The goal of several significant additions is to let employees use new collaboration tools embedded in the features they have always been using on their portals. The new tools integrate with natural working styles and allows Passageways customers to harness the information being generated. For instance, the new activity streams allows employees to learn what others are working on and then join in any relevant discussions. This is a major step towards making all portals more participative and allowing for getting to know your colleagues and their projects better through your interactions on the portal.

This new upgrade is a significant release as it allows every Passageways portal to become “social” incorporating all the latest Web2.0 advances that have value within the enterprise world. This is also a major advance for the community portal segment in mind as portals bringing together people from different organizations will now benefit tremendously from richer user profiles and enhanced privacy settings. Here is a quick list of new additions: in v4.6:

Facebook-like Status Update as they apply to your organization

• Customizable status question / topic
• New Toolbar granting status update functionality
• A switch to turn off Status updates completely

Status Updates as they apply to portal users

• Quick and easy status update capability for portal users
• Ability to add comments on others status updates
• Introducing the “Like button” - a Social Feedback Control for adding your personal rating to status updates

Ability to “Follow” Colleagues

• Get updates from your colleagues by following them on the portal
• Get a notification on birthdays and anniversaries from people you follow
• Gain the ability to “Unfollow” people at any time

New Activity Feed

• Get a new feed item in your activity feed when you are added to a new workgroup
• Get a new feed item in your activity feed when pages are added to your workgroups
• Get a new feed item in your activity feed when someone you follow updates their status
• Get a new feed item on the anniversaries and birthdays of people you follow
• Support for future modules to integrate with activity feeds

Richer User Profiles

• Introducing Status Wall to every portal users profile
• Added ability to add rich custom fields allowing for blogs, URLs, Twitter handle etc
• Profiles track the time elapsed since the last status update
• Rich profile image handling including a thumbnail for all conversations and comments
• Gain insight into which colleagues are “following” you

New Portal Preferences

• New start page now available showing activity feeds, recent portal pages, and alerts
• New toolbar with a status update option

Granular Privacy Settings

• New Privacy settings allows users to control how their profile information is shared
• Privacy can be set for custom defined fields such as teller ID, blog URL, etc.
• Administrators have complete control over privacy settings for individual users and roles
• Three options for profile fields for sharing with Everyone, Just the Supervisor, and No one.

New Functionality to Document Management

• Ability to define a new storage location for portal documents
• Ability to use this new storage location for allowing for version control on documents
• Enhanced ability for external commenting on documents

Enhanced List Creation

• The list Island allows for a creation of list with Text, Documents, Links, and Portal User Profiles
• The lists are customizable including the ability to combine any of these items in one single list

Advanced Themes Management

• Easier Themes management including the ability to export and import any portal themes from the portal admin tools

Passageways is offering a free webinar, as part of an ongoing webinar series, where all new advances will be showcased. This webinar series continues to be very popular among Passageways customers and partners. The various upcoming webinars can be accessed at:

http://info.passageways.com/webinars/  (Each webinar has limited seats)

About Passageways

Passageways specializes in providing corporate portal solutions for financial institutions, connecting their employees, directors, partners and vendors. Passageways solutions are used to streamline communications, increase collaboration and automate internal processes by replacing traditional intranet solutions.  Passageway supports 200 banks and credit unions portals including several dozen board portals and a number of industry wide community portals, making it a leader in collaboration solutions in the financial services industry. Passageways offers a portal framework that enables financial institutions to collaboratively organize and manage documents, processes, internal Web content and other corporate knowledge bases using its several modules. Passageways now has clients in United States, Canada and the Caribbean Islands. For more information please visit http://www.passageways.com/

In picture L-R  Sarah Crowe (Customer Development, Passageways), Jennifer Huie (American Airlines Credit Union), Veronica Martinez (American Airlines Credit Union), Rashmi Bijai (Lead Consulting, Passageways), Carlos Galvan (American Airlines Credit Union), Anne Wertz (Customer Support, Passageways).

WEST LAFAYETTE, Indiana, 5/17/10

Passageways, the leading portal solutions provider for financial institutions, is proud to announce that American Airlines Federal Credit Union is the winner of Passageways' America's Best Portal Page Competition. This online competition was open to all organizations across any industry nationwide, inviting submissions for an image of an employee intranet page or a portal page. The competition was focused on creativity and uniqueness in design of a portal page, while creating a collaborative Web page for employee portals. The winner was to be awarded an Apple iPad, which certainly added to the competition frenzy.

This competition call-out received 44 submissions from the United States and Canada.   Online voting was open to the general public May 5-12. The competition received an overwhelming response, with more than 3,900 people viewing the entries, and nearly 1,600 votes were received in six working days!

 The winner was announced at a spectacular awards ceremony at Passageways' Annual PowWOW Conference in Indianapolis on May 12.  

The winning page was submitted by AA Credit Union in Fort Worth, TX.  Jennifer Huie, Veronica Martinez and Carlos Galvan were there to accept the award, a new Apple iPad. 

Senior Vice President, Gail Enda, expressed "I was thrilled to learn that our landing page won, given the high caliber of the other entries.  The collaborative nature of the design process ensured that our page is easy to use and relevant to our employees."

AA Credit Union's winning team has decided to auction off the iPad using the Auction module within their portal. The money raised will be used to support their "Helping Hands Family Fund", an internal charitable initiative that ensures no child is left without a smile on Christmas morning.

"Passageways is very encouraged at the overwhelming response to this competition. This was a win-win for us, as it allowed us to see how creative our customers are, and reward the most popular choice", says Sarah Crowe, Customer Development Manager at Passageways.

"We had so much fun doing this competition that we'll definitely do more such competitions regularly," Crowe added.

All entries can be viewed at:

http://picasaweb.google.com/PassagewaysPowwow/AmericaSBestPortalPageCompetition?feat=directlink#slideshow/5468148246633387970

West Lafayette, IN. January 4th, 2010 - Passageways, a West Lafayette, IN based portal solutions provider for financial institutions, has wrapped up a memorable year marked with revenue and profit growth, new product launches, several milestones and industry recognition through awards. Overall, Passageways added 32 new portal installations, including employee portals, board portals and several cross organizational collaboration portals. The achievement Passageways is most proud of is raising and donating almost $15,000 for charitable causes during 2009. Passageways also added 4 new employees to its team based out of West Lafayette, IN.

The highlights of Passageways' growth in 2009 includes:

- Rolled out ‘Portal 4', the next version of the flagship portal framework. During 2009, Portal 4 was installed at over 80 Passageways clients and got high marks from those clients.

- Collaborated with Open Solutions Inc., to deliver a collaborative client community portal where more than 300 organizations are now registered to collaborate on best practices around solutions provided by Open Solutions Inc.

- Launched new offerings including a Vendor Management Module, and secured over 30 clients in this first year of the module release.

- Formed a strategic relationship with MC Marketing Communications as the Passageways portal platform provider to all credit unions in Canada.

- Increased hosted application clients to a total of 25 in 2009, including several hosted board portals.

- Added several large banks and credit unions as clients including Genisys credit union, Cobiz Financial, Hudson Valley Credit Union, Roma Bank, and Core First Bank and Trust to its impressive list of over 30 organizations with more than $1 billion in assets.

- Increased participation in Passageways' PowWOW Advanced User and Developer Conference to more than 110 attendees. This 2009 PowWow has been rated as the best conference yet by attending clients.

The list of Awards and Recognition for the year 2009 includes:

- Being re-named on the Inc. 500/5000 list in 2009, for being one fastest growing companies in America, after being included on the Inc. 500 list in 2008.

- Passageways portal solutions were named on the list of "top IT solutions for 2009" by the Bank Technology News publication for its:

• Board portal Solution implementation at Texas based T-Bank
• Learning Management Solution implementation at Bank of American Fork in Utah.

- Passageways portal solution won 2 best practices award from Credit Union Journal, for the fourth year in a row. This year's awards were for:

• Internal collaboration after a merger by Illinois based Alliant FCU
• Collaboration across the distributed organization at Texas based American Airlines CU.

- Passageways was named on the "Indiana Company to Watch" list honoring second stage entrepreneurs for past growth and potential for future growth.

- Passageways was given an honorable mention by Bank News in its list for 2009 Innovative Solutions Award for its Lobby Management solution featuring a touch screen kiosk for branch lobbies.

- Passageways Co-Founder Christopher Beltran was given the Indiana Governor's Award recognizing Tomorrow's Leaders

"Our goals for 2010 include delivering new solutions around community collaboration and exploring untapped markets", said Christopher Beltran, Co-Founder/VP Passageways. "It's an exciting time for collaboration and productivity solution providers.  Our energized team at Passageways is working on some truly innovative solutions for this new decade", adds Beltran.

 "In spite of the soft market we found ourselves in, we found continued demand for our solutions especially from our existing clients" said Paroon Chadha, Co-Founder/VP Passageways. "We are excited to turn in our 6^th consecutive year with profitable growth and for weathering a year like 2009, with a healthy positive bottom-line", adds Chadha.

"It's been very rewarding watching our organization mature so quickly as an innovative solutions provider. I am especially proud of our commitment to share our success by contributing to our chosen charities", says Gail Koehler, President and COO Passageways.

Passageways' PowWOW Advanced User and Developer Conference is scheduled for May 12^th - May 14^th in Indianapolis. More information about the conference is available at http://www.passageways.com/powwow.php

Passageways offers a portal framework that enables organizations to collaboratively organize and manage documents, processes, internal Web content and other corporate knowledge bases using its several modules. For more information please visit http://www.passageways.com/

Passageways is pleased to start a three part series on Learning Management Systems- with 3 blog entries followed by 3 webinars- by Industry leading Evangelist on Learning Management Systems, Ken Burnett from Bank of American Fork.

 The first of the blog entry of the series is available now:

   A Learning Management System Introduction and

Competitive Analysis

(Part 1 of 3)

The first webinar is available for sign up at:

Date: Dec 16th, 2009 at 2:00 PM EST

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/816021291

About Ken Burnett

Passageways Evangelist for Learning Management System

Ken Burnett has over 20 years experience in the Training and Workplace Learning Environment.  His focus is on helping organizations and individuals change behavior to achieve business results.   He is currently the Training Director for Bank of American Fork.  As the Training Director for the Bank, Ken focuses on customer service, sales, systems, compliance, products and services, and policy and procedure training.  Prior to joining the Bank, Ken worked at Fidelity Investments in various training functions in Salt Lake and Boston. 

Ken's perfect day would be to take Mark Twain to a Boston Red Sox.