We first built Directory Burst for publishing web and print directories, but since then, many of you have asked us to build a mobile application — something that parents could use on their smartphones (iPhone or Android) or tablets to access their school directory information.

Well, based upon your feedback and our desire to create a great user experience, I’m pleased to announce that we’ll be launching a mobile app in the next month. I saw a demo from our development team earlier today, and I’m super excited — from your phone, you’ll be able to launch our app, search for your child’s classmates, and click on a link to call or email their parents. Super convenient, and yet another way we’re making Directory Burst the best solution for creating and publishing your school directory!

I’m pleased to announce that after several successful months since launching Directory Burst, we are no longer in beta!

What does that mean? Well, first off, for everybody who created and published an online school directory using Directory Burst during our beta period, we wanted to say a heartfelt thanks. We truly benefited from the feedback that you provided, and hopefully your schools also benefited in return from being able to publish online directories for free during that time.

It also means that for the 2013-14 school year, we will be charging an annual fee for Directory Burst. You can still try Directory Burst completely for free. Assuming you like it, we’ll charge what we think is a pretty affordable price tag that’s based on the size of your school when you decide to publish your directory online or in print. Check out our pricing page for more details.

As always, we welcome any and all feedback on Directory Burst. And we appreciate your support!

When creating your online school directories with Directory Burst, one of the more common questions you’ve asked us is in regards to the security of our service.  From the start, we’ve provided your users with secure access, meaning that only the people you explicitly invite are granted access to your school directory.  Moreover, each invited user is given a unique login (his or her email address) and a password that must be used for accessing the directory.

Today, however, we’re pleased to announce an added layer of security for Directory Burst — SSL encryption.  Without getting too technical, Secure Sockets Layer (or SSL for short) uses a cryptographic system to encrypt data, and it’s commonly used to secure online data transmissions in e-commerce and online banking.  Sites using SSL will commonly display https:// (instead of http://) in front of the site URL in your browser.  And again, because we know that the contact information for students, parents, teachers and administrators in your school is sensitive and confidential, we’ve now secured our site with SSL.

Rest assured that Directory Burst takes the privacy and security of your school directory information seriously!

One of the reasons I was excited to start Directory Burst last year was to help my own kids’ elementary school improve its directory creation process. It felt to me like there had to be a better alternative to Excel, Word, and mail merge, which was cumbersome and error prone.

In previous years, our school only published a printed directory, so it was a big deal if it was distributed with missing or erroneous information. Short of printing an entirely new batch of directories, we had one shot each year to get it right.

So when we started using Directory Burst last year, we discovered an added bonus. Of course, we now had a modern, online alternative to paper. But, by publishing the online version several weeks before the print version, we gave parents time to proofread their students’ contact information and point out any mistakes. We corrected all of that information quickly, exported it in RTF format with a single click in Directory Burst, and then sent that clean version to print.

Oh, and by the way, since the parents had already been exposed to the online version, some of them opted out of a paper copy altogether!

Welcome to the first installment of the Directory Burst blog! I’m Kristin, one of the creators of Directory Burst. For me, it’s really been exciting to see all of the online school directories that have been created to date, and I’m looking forward to more in the coming weeks.

We’ve spent the last few months collaborating with our beta users to learn what’s important in a simple, intuitive online directory solution for schools. It’s been an extremely valuable time for us, and we’re thankful to all of you who have tried our software, given your feedback on the user experience, provided us with new feature ideas, and validated our thoughts on the usefulness of Directory Burst.

Over the coming months, we plan to use this blog to share new developments and ideas with our Directory Burst community, and hopefully hear thoughts from some of you as well. Thanks for your interest in Directory Burst!