Privia (discontinued) vs. GoProposal by Sage

Privia is well-suited for project / proposal management in terms of working on a live proposal or massive document of sorts. However, it is not ideal from a business analytics standpoint. If you are looking for graphical representations and/or snapshots of your project / proposal at a glance, Privia is not for you.

• I liked the structure of breaking down the RFP.
• I liked the way it allows comment bubbles.
• I liked the security of locking it down so that certain portions were kept internal while others could be released externally.

• Burn to CD directly from Privia
• Being able to do a "save as" from the web version to save on my desktop
• Search functionality
• Email directly from Privia if Outlook is not used

Privia has proved, uniformly, to be an asset. I look forward to my next experience with it. While, as I stated, users can feel advance trepidation when using Privia, those problems evaporate immediately when Privia is activated.

It is very intuitive and I found it very easy for my decidedly non-technical users to work with. Training was quite easy even for technophobes or complete newbies. I have a team of about 500 users on this system who are primarily writers and project managers, frequently not computer savvy at all.

We rarely, if ever, had unplanned outages when we were using Privia. When we did, our support staff were attentive and quick to resolve the problem no matter the hour.

Each company is assigned an account manager whom you can contact directly with any questions, comments, and/or concerns. You may contact them directly via email and they will submit a ticket via their system for you or you can submit a ticket through their system and they will contact you immediately. All issues are resolved in a highly timely manner, and the customer service is impeccable. All accounts folks are well-trained from a customer service and technical standpoint and will escalate the issue as necessary depending on their expertise - though, that is rarely a necessity. Should they be unavailable, you will be notified prior to their leave / departure and assigned a secondary contact in the meantime. Overall, I was beyond impressed with Privia's customer support services.

It is critical to plan your implementation carefully and take the time to understand the product. You have to make sure you get the initial set up and design correct so that the tool supports your business practices. If you do this up front, you can have a very successful and easy implementation.

Privia works quite well for developing workflows and processes within the Proposal Development process. It allows you to work offline with your documents without Web access. It allows security to be controlled on a very granular level. It allows you to quickly secure your workspaces and documents without having to work on an individual user basis.

• Significant employee and team efficiency
• Faster review process allowing more team members to participate
• Much improved customer service for our users, who are mostly non-technical writer and managers