Feature Focus: 2 Unsung Heroes of a Modern RMS

I was asked recently, “What would you consider to be the unsung heroes of the VerityRMS research management system?“

In other words, what is it about VerityRMS that really matters to end users, but is sometimes underweighted in terms of importance by decision-makers.  

Two features come to mind. No special order.  

VerityRMS Unsung Hero #1: Text Editor 

Is there anything worse than putting together an investment memo for your boss just to have the images not come through? Or that bulleted list collapse?

Unfortunately — given the proliferation of different apps, browsers, webpages — a research analyst is running into different format and content structures everywhere they go to gather intel.

Getting all the research to a presentable, coherent state is not easy. The amount of time you lose (and the frustration you incur) correcting minor aberrations like re-uploading images or reformatting bullets accumulates very quickly.

Ask any analyst: It’s not a minor inconvenience. It’s a big deal. Perhaps, most importantly, a less-than-perfect text editor stifles user adoption. In fact, as soon as you introduce Microsoft Office into your research workflow, text editing can become a vortex of lost time and annoyance for anyone authoring content.

It’s why we dedicated time to making sure the text editor in VerityRMS was the best-available experience for analysts authoring content and contributing to the research management system every day. Aside from outperforming other RMSs, the text editor in VerityRMS also outperforms Office.com.

It’s the only web-based text editor that:

• Supports pasted images AND text content from Office … while preserving the images (something you won’t find anywhere else).
• Preserves your external formats, even if they aren’t native to the RMS editor. (You can even continue editing with that third-party format.)

Unsung Hero #2: Comment Threading

What good is an RMS if it can’t help you build and quickly digest the full story on any given topic?

VerityRMS offers simple and flexible commenting functionality in-app. Many doubt they’ll take advantage of it at the onboarding phase, but it is one of our most popular features. Probably because today — and especially in any hybrid working model — content and dialogue is flying around and being had everywhere: in the RMS, in email, on mobile devices.

Here’s the problem: many other RMS will only show you the first comment made on X topic. This is helpful for seeing an original discussion point, but where did the conversation go from there?

With Verity you can:

• Comment on any colleague’s note you have access to. (PMs can even post a private comment shared with the analyst only.)
• Search the comments and, with a single click, see the original note and all conversation thereafter.

More email centric? The same capabilities are in place for teams that prefer to use email for this purpose. Any and all email replies are auto-threaded as a comment — whether the note originated as an email or was sent out via an RMS notification.

This way, whether folks are having dialogue in app, in their Outlook, or even replying from their mobile phone, Verity is going to aggregate and consolidate the entire conversation automatically

Bottom Line

Yes, there are many important factors to consider when considering research management systems. In my experience working with new customers to modernize their research workflows, the text editor and the comment threading in VerityRMS come up as truly essential — if sometimes overlooked — RMS features.