Yesterday we inaugurated our first substantial test platform for our new delivery system. After the January 2021 update there will not be any more updates delivered through the mail. Instead we are using some technology from Amazon to host and deliver our application in the cloud. We expect to begin transitioning clients to this platform on a voluntary basis early in the 4th quarter and while we will make the final 2020 update available to allow those that want to transition a bit slower – that will be the final update.

The AWS Appstream service is amazing and provides us the opportunity to improve the timeliness of filing access (think of near immediate) as well as relieve your IT staff of their responsibility for local management of directEDGAR. The best thing about this change is that we do not have to impose any of the limits that come from a web based search. We can continue to provide the absolute best search experience and make the platform available to you anywhere – anytime.

I am looking for 10 beta testers from our users. If you are interested please send me an email. As a beta tester you can help us make sure we have some good user feedback on the experience. I will note I am already excited about this experience – searching and rendering is about 40% faster than on my local computer. The people who will get the most out of this experience initially will be those who need access to the most timely 10-K and DEF 14A filings. I expect the full directEDGAR content to be available by the middle to the end of this month.

We also need some advice or suggestions regarding the addition of metadata to our filings. Right now we include the SEC dissemination date (RDATE) as well as the conformed date (CDATE) and the item codes for each 8-K filing. We include word counts and issuer details like SIC code, FYE. We also provide doctype that drills down to the conformed exhibit code. I am intending to add the actual filing date/time stamp (most filings made on Friday after 5:30 have a Monday RDATE as they are not disseminated until 6:00 AM on Monday. I also want to add filer status (LARGE ACCELERATED, ACCELERATED etc) Is there anything else that you think should be added? If you remember – the metadata provides additional filtering opportunities. The idea is we can search documents for search phrases and words and then additionally filter on the metadata to provide even more focused results.