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SOE Software - The 2005 Year in Review

2005 was another great year of continued growth for SOE Software. Our top accomplishments for the year included signing new clients, welcoming new team members to the SOE Software family, unveiling an exciting new product image, and introducing two new products.

The expansion of our software lines has resulted in a concurrent expansion in the interest in our products and services. We are actively working nation-wide with customers and prospects. In some cases this has included state level interest in our products. In order to meet demand we have added to our staff, bringing together the right mix of personality, experience, and future potential that will best serve our customers and partners. SOE Software also recognizes that, as we grow, maintaining good customer relations remains ultimately the most important aspect of what we do. We stand ready to provide the very highest level of service to our customers as they perform one of the most important functions of a free, democratic society: fair, impartial and accurate elections.

In keeping with our goals of helping elections officials bring clarity and transparency to the elections process, we have unified our products and our future developments into a suite of election support tools we call The Clarity Suite. To counter those cynics who describe the election processes as a “black box” we have made every effort to provide tools that will bring clarity to those processes. SOE Software is dedicated to continuous improvement of our own products and processes. Let us introduce you to the Clarity Suite: Connect, Training and Control.

WinEMS, SOEWeb, Precinct Reporting/RealTime Reporting and CFinance applications have been unified under the name Clarity Connect as their ultimate purpose is to connect elections officials to their constituency. These products were designed to fuse vital election information and provided that to voters, candidates, the media, schools and anyone interested in our electoral process. Our on line training product is know as Clarity Training. Finally, our election planning and tracking product is referred to as Clarity Control for the ability it provides to elections officials to control productivity, efficiency and effectiveness.

While our web content, candidate finance, and election night reporting tools continue to be well received, we use customer feedback to improve existing products and help develop new ideas. Through customer feedback and SOE Software’s continued commitment toward helping our customers and partners, we implemented Clarity Control and Clarity Training. These new products empower the media, voters, candidates, and students, enabling them to gain greater insight into the process and practice of elections. Our ultimate goal is to bring clarity to a process that is otherwise considered a “black box”. We will continue to help elections officials bring transparency to their processes and increase productivity to daily operations. Our products are tools easily integrated into the everyday routines of election officials.

The one request we heard loud and clear from our customers was, “We need help modernizing our internal process”. Much work had been done to upgrade voting systems and voter registration systems, but there were no tools available to help elections officials increase efficiency and productivity. The two areas of most concern included Poll Worker training and election planning and tracking.

Knowledgeable Poll Workers is the key to a successful election. They provide direction and support to each voter within their county. With greater emphasis on ensuring the rights of the voter are not abridged and stricter HAVA regulations, the need for a streamlined, consistent training process was required. SOE Software took on this challenge with the development of our Clarity Training Platform. It meets the HAVA “measured effectiveness” requirement by offering periodic assessments, and in-depth reporting. Because the Clarity Training product is web based, it is available anywhere, anytime. Therefore, allowing a broader spectrum of registered voters to join our customers’ temporary election worker team. The potential to shift demographics and bring a new generation of workers into the elections process is enormous.

The second area of customer focus was election planning and tracking. SOE Software set out to create a product that would help elections officials gain visibility over the hundreds of tasks associated with a successful election. By leveraging the technology of the World Wide Web, we have developed a tool that will support strategic planning while maintaining continuous insight into the tasks necessary to conduct a fair and impartial election. Previously, election officials were forced to gather information from their staff through meetings and reports. Gathering staff together for information sharing meetings, especially in larger counties, is inefficient, time consuming and expensive. Often resulting in data that is days old. With the Clarity Control product, elections officials will have the la test information on tasks and resource statuses at their fingertips. Decisions can be made based upon the la test information and resources can be allocated efficiently and swiftly. As a planning tool, Clarity Control will allow elections officials to layout election schedules as far into the future as they have information, allocate resources to those elections, and determine the dollar and people impact of those events. Clarity Control will allow for “what if” analysis and provide budgetary information with a much greater degree of accuracy. Future modules will examine specific election events and provide visual “models”; calculate machine distribution based upon ballot length and precinct populations; resource reallocation to meet shortfalls in your most critical resource, time; and finally cueing challenges in Early Voting sites. We are very proud of this product and feel that it will be a tremendous benefit to everyone in the elections process.