I just wanted to first of all say a big thank you to all the educational establishments that have joined the ExamWritePad family, its was a tough call to decide to move from the free model but we have been delighted with the response. We hope you continue with that support and hopefully get a few new schools onboard too during 2024-25.
Having been involved in all sides of the spectrum, working closely with exams officers and Learning support to deliver the best experience for students right up to actually taking exams myself (long time ago granted) I do appreciate the amount of work that goes into running exams and also the many many months of preparation that goes into the planning. With the summer exam window now tightly shut, we do hope that this period was largely uneventful and you all sailed through it with the limited amount of disruption possible.
Future Plans
Looking to the future, we are now in a period of reflection and planning what ExamWritePad requires moving forward. The April version was the last major version to be released in preparation for the summer exam in May, but we have had to release two further updates since to deal with unexpected issues that didn’t come to light until recently.
The most obvious plan is to continue to improve stability across all different installs/configurations of Windows PC’s. We don’t hide the fact we have a challenging few months with a couple of schools where the odd few PC’s just didn’t want to run ExamWritePad at a considered reasonable level. We are glad to say that those schools are now sorted and can continue the use of ExamWritePad with the knowledge that if there ever was an issue, we will help you because our driver is to deliver the best experience/performance to the end-user and give the examinations team and I.T teams peace of mind that there shouldn’t be any issues during any exam season.
We have plans to try to improve the PDF aspect, in terms of OCR text, highlighting spoken words, allow text highlighting text pen and further interactive developments, but these features depend on whether the developers build them into their software for us developers to utilise and adapt. Watch this space!
We also have plans to offer document security as in password protected from being opened and read that is compatible with Microsoft Word. This will replace the custom encryption module in EWP long term, again this might be a year away as it requires the developers of the text document addon to have such a feature on their roadmap.
We are also making inroads to reduce the minor visual issues caused by screen DPI scaling at 125% or higher, this was always an issue with any WinForms application developed.
Our longer term roadmap we hope to convert EWP to C# and in turn convert to .Net 8 or 9 to secure its future as inevitably .Net framework 4.8 will be unsupported at some point.
A little help from our friends…
What we would like to do is ask schools for their input and if they would like to see specific things featured in EWP. If there is something you would like to see then please email into us using the contact us form on the website, or a direct email to [email protected]
We would love to give you what you want or need moving forward. The obvious one we cannot do just yet is make EWP cross-platform, supporting Linux, ChromeOS or macOS. This will come eventually but only as a web-based solution in a few years time, if not sooner as the company grows with your continued support.
Pricing Plans
This now leads me on to the inevitable topic of current pricing and future pricing. I know is a sore topic when prices go up and no-one likes it but it is an inevitable thing that happens when trying to run a business. For us, we have discussed it and as the company grows, we plan to re-invest that money into staffing, advertising, feasibility into making ExamWritePad cross platform.
Because the currently pricing was only ever supposed to be an ‘introductory offer’, we felt that to put the prices back up their RRP (1-year normally retails @ £499 and 3-year @ £1299) would not be in our best interests for existing customers or new customers. Therefore, we have decided on the following pricing structure.
As of September 1st 2024:
1-Year license = £275 + VAT (increase of around £2 per month)
2-Year license = £500 + VAT (replaces the 3-year license)
We feel that this new structure allows you take advantage of the previous 1-year introductory price at the commitment of 2 years.
Training Material/Help Guides
I know is probably long overdue but with the development slowing down a little during the next few months, I wanted to address the lack of training/help material available. I’ve always maintained that ExamWritePad is so easy to use and get to grips with that you can install it and play with it without the need for help. I still think that today but with an ever expanding feature set and some features hidden by default that could be useful to others, I wanted to start to think about releasing material, written and video this year. Which brings me to ask that if any schools have already created any literature or videos for ExamWritePad, however big or small, please can I ask you to send them through to me via email to [email protected] and create a community of resources, hints/tips etc…
This will be very much appreciated indeed.
We wish you every success and thank you for supporting ExamWritePad.
Regards,
Andrew Sheldon, C.E.O ExamWritePad Limited
