Dear DACIS Subscribers,
Today we take the wraps off the biggest change to the DACIS interface in seven years. Here are the highlights of what you'll find:

• A New Header. The first thing you'll notice is our website's new header. It uses less "vertical real estate" then the old header, and the format is cleaner and easier to read.
  
• Navigating With a Bread Crumb Trail. The second thing you'll notice is that navigating around the site has taken a leap forward. As you move from module to module, you'll notice when returning to modules you've already visited that it "remembers your place", returning you to the last screen you visited. It's a big site—surf it with confidence!
  
• The New Customers Module. One of our account reps once referred to Customers as the "poor step-child" of the DACIS service. Which, in view of the importance of customers to all our livelihoods, didn't seem right.
  
  So we've given this module a stem-to-stern overhaul, with a new look and some nice new capabilities. For the first time you can look at U.S. government agencies in hierarchical fashion. And the "Suppliers" layout lets you look at all the programs being performed at a customer by companies of interest to you.
  
  Oh, and don't neglect to click the FedBizOpps solicitations, to see solicitations which are open for bidding right now at customers of interest to you.
  
  We could say more, but why not just take a look?
  
• Reports. It's always been a bit of a pain to flag and export large numbers of records from the DACIS service. We had to design our service to meet limitations Microsoft builds into Internet Explorer. That Microsoft limitation is still with us... but we've found a workaround that's rather nice. And we've given you a sleeker interface with improved abilities to export AND to print the records you've flagged.
  
• My Account. The "My Account" section of yesterday's website was a bit, well, underwhelming. In the new one you'll find just about everything you could want to know about your account: how many seats you hold (and who holds them), what services you're receiving, how to contact your account rep, what your usage has been over the past 12 months, and more. We'll even tell you if you're late paying your most recent invoice (it's better than a phone call, right?)

The Path Forward
You'll notice that our website now sports a number of different looks. The "new" look of Customers, Sitewide Search, My Account, and Reports, and the "old" look of our other modules. The explanation is that we wanted to get these new capabilities into your hands as quickly as possible. Our programmers are already at work redesigning the rest of the website. Redesigned modules will be rolled out as they're completed.
We hope you like the changes. Don't hesitate to call if you have questions or comments.
Best regards,

Stuart McCutchan
President
InfoBase Publishers, Inc.
March 21, 2009