What's next for Funnelback?

December is for holidaying, reading books and sleeping in; or maybe for you it’s a time for festivities and fun. Whatever your preferences, it is always a time for reflecting on the year that has been, and getting excited about your plans for the next 12 months.

We are excited about 2017 too, and we wanted to take the opportunity to share with you some of the Funnelback product development plans we have in play.

Funnelback Products

Over the last year, our Production team have been busily buzzing away on Stencils - in what spare time they have when not focusing on customer implementations. Stencils form the framework which allow implementers to reuse and share code. Stencils eventually team up with other Stencils to grow into individual solutions, such as a university course finder, for example. These components are the building blocks of products.

Next year, our dedicated team will be expanding on Stencils to create fully fledged products which address key organizational problems for industry verticals. While some details are still to be worked out, an example would be a Higher Education product. This product would be a suite of pre-built Course, Grants and Expertise Finders, which allows faster, less expensive and more stable implementations.

Insights - Content and Accessibility Auditor

A key component of our vision as a company is ‘Information and Insights’. We believe valuable insights come from analysis of information and that these insights often make information more findable. In line with this vision, we will continue to make headway in becoming a market leader in business insights by enhancing our Content Auditor and Accessibility Auditor offerings.

In 2017, you’ll be seeing a brand new Accessibility Auditor, and some exciting additions to the Content Auditor.

Implementers Dashboard

Earlier this year, we released a brand new interface, the Marketing Dashboard. The dashboard’s aim is to hide the complexity away, allowing non-technical users to make the most of new and existing Funnelback features and to understand their analytics tools better. The dashboard has received great feedback, and while we continue our work improving on that experience, it’s time for our technical users to get some of our attention.

Ease-of-use in regard to installation, implementation and support still remains very high on the agenda as more and and more partners and customers start implementing Funnelback on their own. The new Implementers Dashboard will facilitate interaction with the search that is independent, intuitive, and relies less on documentation and support.

Connectors

The ability to work with any repository, anywhere, is frequently dependent on connectors, and as such connectors are absolutely pivotal to robust enterprise search implementations. We’ll be placing significant investment in developing better connectors in 2017 with dedicated R&D resources.

Upgrades

As Funnelback continues to grow, signing up more customers and partners each day, enabling more efficient and effective upgrading is a key priority. To achieve this, we are focusing on improving:

• Maintenance - Ensuring that Funnelback is more robust and easier to monitor, track and audit
• Upgradability - Getting customers onto the latest version of Funnelback quickly and easily

Analytics

Funnelback has always had a strong analytics capability, and in 2017 we will be focusing on how we can better align our analytics measures against the specific business goals of our customers. We can’t get into that detail yet, but we can say it is an exciting new development that has the potential to open up a world of possibilities.

Next Generation Search

Okay, we are open, and we’ve loved sharing the exciting new product development plans for 2017, but we’d be silly to share what we are working on for the next generation of Funnelback search. Rest assured we are working hard behind the scenes to continue improving your search experience.