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/

West Lafayette, IN. March 4th, 2010 - Passageways, a West Lafayette, IN based portal solutions provider continues to report world class results. For the second year in a row, Bank Technology News has named a Passageways portal solution on its just release list of 5 Industry best practices for community banks for the past year. A recently signed   Passageways client, Circle bank, was honored on that list.

Circle bank's HR portal called BLINK, planned and delivered in a short 2 month implementation time period, was recognized for its high efficiency gains for the bank. These results have been shared with the community banking industry in the March issue of Bank Technology News. 

Passageways solutions were also named on this Bank Technology News list in 2009 for two of its solutions:

1. A board portal solution for T Bank

2. A portal based Learning Management Solution for Bank of American Fork

As per the Bank Technology News article, this project was impressive on several counts. Here are the excerpts from the article:

A tech project that saves each employee 20 minutes of productivity time per day may not sound extraordinary, but for Circle Bank it was like discovering gold underneath the parking lot.

"It's a one stop shop for everything, information about the bank is out there for everyone to see every single day," says Betty House, VP of information systems for Circle Bank.

The savings come from "BLINK" (or Bank Link), an HR portal led by Circle Bank and supported by an implementation team from Passageways.  BLINK is a centralized location for information on the bank's performance, programs, new initiatives, recruitment ads and procedures. "It's a one stop shop for everything, information about the bank is out there for everyone to see every single day," says Betty House, VP of information systems for Circle Bank.

BLINK operates across all business lines, with employees logging onto the portal each morning to access their time sheets; as well as reach out to help desks for IT, training, and new business support; locate rate sheets, deposit and loan documents; view updated dashboards of performance numbers; and read messages from the bank's senior management. Security is provided by SSL encryption that protects the portal from outside intruders.

The bank's CEO, Kim Kaselionis, also has an area on the portal to post information, as well as take public questions from employees. A new section will soon be introduced that will have profiles of more than 30 products.

"$440 per day is a cool savings of $110,000 per year. That is an impressive return from on their investment, perhaps the easiest game-changer in your organization" - Andy Mills, Business Development Manager, Passageways

By estimating the incremental efficiency gains of automation and centralization, the bank estimates each employee saves 20 minutes of work per day (the bank projects the new section on products will up that to 30 minutes daily). Based on an average yearly cost of $55,000 per employee for 2,080 hours worked-or $0.44 per minute-20 minutes of productivity savings comes out to $9.61 per employee, or $440 across the bank each day. That means the $9,000 yearly cost of the project-about 7 percent of the overall IT budget-is paid for within a month. "The efficiencies were substantial," House says. "We will be able to eliminate shared drives within the network because we have one place where everyone can view the information needed. Network file storage will decrease tremendously."

The savings would not be possible without staff enthusiasm, and for Circle that meant departmental participation and the quick implementation provided by a hosted software-as-a-service model. "SaaS made it possible to roll out in 60 days, which is key to getting buy-in," House says. "If you talk about doing something and it takes a long time to deploy, it can be harder to get participation." And House says that each department "took ownership" of its section of the portal, submitting proposals to the project team for inclusion.

"From an IT perspective, it's a very smart deployment," says Ellen Carney, a senior analyst for Forrester Research, who says the hosted nature of the project removes some burden off the IT department's shoulders-House is the bank's only IT staffer. "At community banks, [IT execs] wear a zillion different hats.  It has to support HR make sure it has sufficient access management and identity systems, and, by the way, you have to also keep a lookout for fraud."

Paroon Chadha, founder of Passageways, says the bank's migration from an HR intranet to a portal also allows it to customize information for specific users, with features such as alerts for customer facing workers and dashboards for senior management.

Passageways will be showcasing these results at their upcoming conference:

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.   

 

 

A platform for all client collaboration and communication!

WEST LAFAYETTE, September 25, 2009 -- Passageways, a West Lafayette, Ind.-based portal solutions provider for financial services industry, and Open Solutions Inc. have jointly delivered a portal for Open's client community creating an "always on" community for Open Solutions' clients. This mark's an industry first, where a community of several hundred credit unions and banks from across the world are now a part of a dynamic community for connecting with information and their peers. Passageways was the chosen provider given its extensive experience in delivering collaboration portals for the financial services industry and the familiarity of several Open Solutions' clients with the portal platform.

This portal serves the ever growing need for clients to connect with each other and with Open's staff, using the portal to share their Open Solutions-related experiences and best practices. The solution was first piloted at a regional level and given its success, it was scaled for the entire Open client community. The portal is governed by Open's clients who can connect and collaborate at various levels including portal-wide, along product lines, among geographic regions and at a project level. At each of these levels, clients can share information including calendars, discussions, documents, agendas, best practices, and also get connected with other members of the client community without having to seek them out on LinkedIn or on Facebook.

The clients and Open Solutions team have also come up with a slew of Web 2.0 features that allow them to connect with various community members including twitter-like status updates, rich people profiles, organizational profiles, blogs and a Facebook-like wall. This community portal also allows users to filter the community in several ways and allows for easy searching across the portal community and content.

The clients have already shown excitement about this initiative with several messages and posts across various groups. In the first few weeks the portal has achieved a daily page view count of several hundred pages and regular new user signups. Open Solutions plans to bring on its entire client base in 2010, from 5200 client organizations.

"The Open Solutions Client Association portal has solved a relationship challenge by centralizing communications and correspondence not only with Open Solutions and our clients but equally important on a client peer-to-peer level," says Scott Starace, Sr. Director, Organization Readiness at Open Solutions. Starace adds, "Having gone live with the Client Association portal just over 30 days ago, we are quickly seeing benefits with the introduction of this social network of information and best practices provided by the clients, for the clients." 

Open Solutions employees participate at the portal as well. "Case avoidance is one of our goals," said Dennis Madson, Vice President Client Care. "If we can better enable clients through a community knowledgebase to be more self-sufficient and utilize our systems to their greatest capacity, it will reduce our case inflow. We also get a pulse on the client base at a very deep level as we hear from movers and shakers using our systems."

One of the Open clients, Kathy Houghtalen from Beacon Credit Union ($880M in assets, Indiana), said "This portal provides an invaluable resource to connect with people who are working on similar projects and relate to us right away. Information on things like which department and what skills are needed for working on a particular new project, can make a huge difference in the final outcome of the project and this portal allows us to gather such information freely." From Beacon Credit Union 10 employees are now plugged into this community regularly.

"We are excited about this great joint initiative and the progressive vision shown here. This client community is now in an ‘always on' mode and we are excited to facilitate and streamline information sharing through our platform," say Paroon Chadha, Co-Founder/VP, Passageways.

"This type of portal allows clients to capture the tribal wisdom for easy reference by other clients and the vendor. This wisdom can then be morphed into more structured product ideas, enhancements and best practices," adds Chadha.

This is potentially the largest portal initiatives undertaken in the credit union industry, given the wide participation and inherent flexibility of the project scope. This client community is powered by Passageways newest version P4 and also has several web 2.0 features needed for getting such communities to be social and vibrant. In just 6 weeks, already more than 300 clients (banks and credit unions) have become a part of this online community out of a total of 770 core clients that Open Solutions has. Eventually all Open solutions clients from United States, Canada and the rest of the world will be able to access this community portal.

This project is benefiting from several Open Solutions' clients who are already familiar with Passageways products and now acting as strong advocates for this exciting project at their regional levels.

"We see this as the general direction for all businesses in future," says Christopher Beltran, Co-Founder/VP, Passageways. "Passageways is happy to lead the next wave of innovation in collaboration and we have several new offerings slated for release in the next few months for such community portals," adds Beltran.

The Open Solutions Client Association Portal is the first of a string of client community portals that Passageways has currenly under wraps for the financial industry, suggested Christopher Beltran, Passageways co-founder and VP.

 

About Open Solutions Inc.

Open Solutions Inc. offers a fully-featured strategic information management product platform that integrates core processing applications built on a single centralized Oracle relational database, with Internet banking, cash management, CRM/business intelligence, financial accounting and management tools, profitability tools, wealth management, imaging, digital documents, interactive voice response, technology services, HSAs, payments and loan origination solutions. Open Solutions' full suite of products and services allows banks, thrifts, credit unions and financial services providers in the United States, Canada and internationally to better compete in today's aggressive financial services marketplace, and expand and tap their trusted financial relationships, client affinity, community presence and personalized service.

 

About Passageways

Founded in 2003, West Lafayette, Ind.-based Passageways is portal solution provider offering the financial services industry with portal products. Passageways has delivered 180 employee portals, over 50 board portals and several cross organization community portals in the financial industry.

The company's flagship product, Passageways Corporate Portal Framework, provides financial institutions with the ability to organize, manage and deliver role-based views and access to streamline communication, organize enterprise knowledge and automate business processes. For more information about Passageways, visit www.passageways.com.

###

 For More Information about this product, contact Paroon Chadha

 paroonatpassagewaysdotcom

 

West Lafayette, IN. September 9th, 2009 - Passageways, Indiana based portal solutions provider for financial institutions, has signed 5 new portal customers in the last 8 weeks. Besides its new clients, Passageways is also reporting several new module sales to its growing list of clients. The recently signed customers from this past few weeks include:  

• First Community Federal Credit Union, Parchment, MI
• American Heritage Bank, Sapulpa, OK
• Security Bank, Odessa, TX
• Fox Communities Credit Union, Appleton, WI
• CGH Medical, Sterling, IL

All new clients are now being implemented on the new version of the portal framework, P4.

Passageways now offers 25 different software applications to its almost 200 clients specific to the financial industry. Several of these clients are now using portals powered by the new version of the Passageways portal framework, P4, which includes several new options including Navigation options, Start Page options, Page Layout options, Tool Bar options and Themes.

Given the varied usage of the portal framework, such options will allow current and future clients to create unique portal environments which can look very different for select audiences - your employees, management teams, directors, partners etc.

"Passageways is benefiting from the renewed significance to increasing employee productivity and our new version of the portal framework, P4, comes with more functionality than any portal framework in the market" said Paroon Chadha, Co-Founder and VP of Passageways.  "We offer more applications than any single organization can ever develop internally and package them in very attractive price points and are now seeing the results of our investment in not just the portal technology, but also the business applications the market needs," added Chadha.

Passageways has also seen more than a dozen new clients signed up for the Vendor management Application in the last 6 weeks. This new application allows its clients to categorize and track their various vendors. It allows organizing the contract documents with alerts around important dates and renewal timeframes. The application has been very well received especially given the audit requirements by the NCUA.

Recent Module Purchases by Passageways Clients:

1.  Interra CU - Assigned Tasks, Products and Services, and Vendor Management

2.  Pacific Continental Bank - Learning Management and Vendor Management

3.  Belco Community CU - Vendor Management

4.  IH Mississippi Valley CU - System Status Application

5.  Arizona State CU - Vendor Management, Invoice Management, Expense Reports

6.  Eli Lilly FCU - Vendor Management

7.  Alliance CU - Vendor Management

8.  Citizens Security Bank - Vendor Management

9.  Forum CU - Vendor Management

10.  USU CU- Learning Management

11.  Five Point CU - Custom Work via Consulting Department

12.  Alliance CU- eForms and Timesheets with ADP Tie-In via Consulting

13.  Purdue Employees FCU - Vendor Management

14.  Connex CU- Custom Navigation via Consulting Department

15.  NuUnion CU- Vendor Management

 

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 nearly 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/

- Application Facilitates Auctions in the Passageways Portal Framework -

WEST LAFAYETTE, May 21st, 2009  -- Passageways, a West Lafayette, Ind.-based portal solutions provider for over 150 financial institutions, launched a new product at its fourth annual Advanced User and Developer Conference,  last year. Applying its knowledge and experience in the portal software industry to its philanthropic efforts, Passageways had developed a portal application that has been specifically tailored to facilitate charitable giving. After a year, Passageways reports a total of $11,423 being raised thorough these efforts and donated it to deserving charities in Indianapolis.

The application was being offered with a "name your price" method, allowing organizations to choose how much they would like to "pay" for the application. Whatever the named price becomes was donated in its entirety to the charities pre-chosen by Passageways' employees:

• YWCA (local Lafayette/West Lafayette chapter)
• Children's Miracle Network
• American Heart Association
• American Cancer Society
• Brees Dream Foundation

At PowWOW 2009, Passageways team invited representatives from all these fine charities to present the checks to them. This year's client conference was a fitting occasion as the contribution was done in front of all the customers and this marked another collaboration effort between Passageways staff and its customers.

"We thank all our customers who participated in this great initiative and especially thank our development and support teams which got involved in making this happen", says Paroon Chadha Co-Founder Passageways. Chadha Adds, "We are happy to note that all customers who have used this module have reported great results and we are happy to extend this program for another 12 months! All proceeds from this module sale in this year will also go to charities, and be presented in 2010."

The Auction Manager Application, developed by Passageways, consists of two islands and a "Module Administration Tool" that allows Financial Institutions to easily manage an auction inside the Passageways Portal Framework. For more information on the application, see the philanthropy Web page at: http://www.passageways.com/philanthropy.php

About Passageways

Passageways is a corporate portal solution provider offering the financial services industry a framework that streamlines and enhances internal communications. The company's flagship product, Passageways Corporate Portal Framework, provides financial institutions with the ability to organize, manage and deliver role-based views and access to enterprise information, applications and workflow processes for increased collaboration, efficiency and profitability. For more information about Passageways, visit www.passageways.com