Approver.com Will Shut Down on April 15, 2011

We’ve already announced this on the site and via email to Approver.com users, but we figured an announcement on ye olde dusty blog wouldn’t hurt either. The site will shut down on April 15, 2011. On this date, all documents and files on the site will be deleted permanently. If you have data on the site you wish to preserve, you should download it immediately. Read more about the impending shutdown here.

Update, October 24 2009

We just pushed a new release of Approver.com to the site. With this release, we’ve removed support for a couple of features of Approver.com. We are doing this to streamline the Approver.com experience, and also because the number of users who had ever utilized these features were very small. The changes we made today will support a planned major rewrite of Approver.com that we are hoping to launch early next year.

The affected features are:

• Support for embedding Meebo chat windows in document approval windows. Of course, we still support comments on documents, and you can still create a chat window using Meebo or any comparable chat product (such as Skype, AIM, or Yahoo! Messenger) outside of the Approver.com document review page to collaborate with document reviewers in real time. We just don’t support the notion of embedding the Meebo chat window in the web browser.
• Support for publishing documents to a blog. To reference an Approver.com document from a blog, simply make the document public, then link to its public URL from a blog post. In the planned revision of Approver.com we’re working on ways to make public access to your files and documents much easier, and this is the first step in that direction.

Thanks as always for using Approver.com, and please let us know if you have any feedback.

Updated In-Browser Word Processor, New Styles for Site

This evening we deployed a new version of Approver.com. This release contains a new version of our in-browser word processor that resolves a few mostly cosmetic issues we’ve been seeing over the past few weeks, particularly with Webkit-based browsers such as Safari, as well as a problem with pop-up dialogs not closing properly on Firefox 3.

In addition, we re-engineered the template for the site home page to look a little nicer and resolve a few oddities. We applied this template to the portion of the site in front of the login (that is, the part of the site you can view without logging in). This includes the home page, registration and login pages, the online help system and a few other miscellaneous pages). Hopefully this will provide a nicer experience for new and existing users; simplifying our templates also has the benefit of making the site easier for us to upgrade and maintain.

Searching My Documents

Tonight we pushed a new version of the site that includes a new and much-requested feature: the ability to search for documents from your My Documents page.

This is a very simple search — it doesn’t search within your documents, it only searches on the document’s name — but we’re hoping based on the discussions we’ve had with those of you who have requested this feature that it’ll be sufficient for most of the searching you need to do.

If you need a slightly more sophisticated way to keep track of a large number of documents in Approver.com, you should have a look at tags. Tags are a way to organize documents by assigning keywords to them. After you’ve assigned tags to your documents, from your tags page you can click on a link to see a list of all your documents that have that tag.

Tags are sort of like organizing documents into folders, but ultimately they’re much better, because unlike folders, any document can be associated with any number of tags. You can assign tags to document on the document’s edit page.

New Feature: Delete Workgroups

We’ve officially ended our summer hiatus by pushing a new version of the site today. Today we added a feature to every workgroup that enables the workgroup creator (and only the workgroup creator) to delete the workgroup. This gives you more control over your documents by making it easy to revoke permissions from all the documents in the workgroup with just a few clicks.

To see how this feature works, go to your workgroups page, then click on any workgroup that was created by you. If you’re the workgroup creator, you should be able to see a shiny new “delete” button at the bottom of the page. Careful about clicking it, though — deleting a workgroup is not undoable.

This new feature doesn’t seem like it would be a huge deal, and really it isn’t, but a lot of people asked for it. The demand for this feature is probably a function of the fact that workgroups are a pretty popular feature. We’ll continue to look at ways we can make workgroups (and the rest of Approver.com) more useful for you in the future. As always, if you have any suggestions, please let us know.

Compatibility Pack for Microsoft Office 2007/2003

Since adding support for the new Microsoft Office 2007 document formats on Approver.com, lots of our users have begun sharing Office 2007 documents. But some of us aren’t quite ready to upgrade yet. So what happens if some of your users are using Office 2007 while some are sticking with Office 2003 for now?

Microsoft has you covered with a tool called the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack. It’s intended for Office 2003 users who need to view and save files in the new Office 2007 format. So if anybody sends you a document with a file extension like .xlsx or .docx, the Compatibility Pack is what you need. Download it here.

New Feature: My Feed

Our users are always asking for more information about the life cycle of their documents, and we’re happy to give it to them. We’ve always provided a reviewer status box on the document page and email alerts to let you know when interesting things happen to your documents. But it’s never been easy to get a clear summary of what’s going on with all your documents and reviewers on a single page.

This week we introduce a new way to keep track of what’s going on with your documents. My Feed shows you all the events that you and your collaborators have taken on your documents on Approver.com in the last 60 days. The items that appear in your feed are even more detailed and granular than the information you receive in email alerts, and your feed is also available in RSS format so you can follow it in a feed reader such as Google Reader or My Yahoo.

My Feed is accessible at the top of every page when you’re logged in to Approver.com. This is a free upgrade for all Approver.com users.

Sticky Documents

This week we added a new feature to Approver.com: Sticky Documents. This gives you the ability to highlight a document with a single click and make that document stay at the top of your My Documents list. It’s a handy way to make those documents you’re working on at the moment easily accessible.

To make a document sticky, simply click on the document’s Make Sticky link in your My Documents list. To unstick the document, click on the Unstick link. Simple, sanitary and fun.

Support for Sharing Microsoft Works Files

Today we made a little change to our upload page to enable sharing of Microsoft Works files with the .WKS extension.

This change came about as a result of a user request. If you have a file type that you’d like to share on Approver.com, please leave us feedback.

More Tweaks to Upload Page

Today we released a fix to our upload page that resolves an issue that was preventing some Approver.com Pro users from taking advantage of our new 50 megabyte maximum for file uploads. If you have a Pro account, you should be able to upload files of up to 50 megabytes in size; if you don’t have a Pro account, upgrade here.

Tweaks to Upload Page; Scrivener Support

We just released a new version of the Approver.com upload page that fixes a problem having to do with the way we store old versions of uploaded files. If you were one of the two or three users who were having trouble accessing revisions of uploaded files this week, this should fix things.

Today we also added support for uploading and sharing Scrivener files. Scrivener is a terrific tool for writers; it has an integrated outliner, a place for research notes and external links, and awesome project management features. It’s particularly good for working on book-length projects. For more information, check out their web site or read the NY Times’ glowing review of Scrivener that came out last week.

Bigger and Better Uploads

Today we’ve made some significant enhancements to the way you can upload files to Approver.com. Paid Approver.com Pro users can now upload and share files as large as 50 megabytes.

In addition to increasing the maximum upload size, we’ve added a few new file types that you can share on Approver.com. These include media files (digital video as well as MP3s) as well as compressed .ZIP archives. As with the more generous upload limit, these new file types are available to paid Approver.com Pro users only. Upgrade now to take advantage of these handy new features.

Last but not least, we’ve re-engineered our upload page to make the process of uploading a file much friendlier, particularly for large files. You can now see a progress bar in the browser that shows you how much time your upload will take, and the page will validate your upload before the upload is sent (so you won’t waste time uploading a file that’s too large for us to accept, for example).

Approver.com Update, 21. Nov 2007

We pushed out a new version of the site this morning to resolve a few issues that came up following our last upgrade on Sunday. The fixes mostly had to do with workgroups, contacts and inviting users to review documents, so if you ran into anything strange with those features in the last day and a half or so, it should be fixed now.

As always, if you have any questions about the site or problems you’d like help with, we’re always just a few clicks away.

Take Control of Your Email Alerts

When Approver.com launched, we provided a single kind of email alert (the one you receive when someone invites you to review a new document). This alert could only be sent to a single email address (the one you used when you registered). It wasn’t easy to change your email address. It was impossible for a user to have more than one email address. And if you wanted to turn email alerts on or off, you were out of luck, which frustrated a few of our users.

Over the past year, we made it possible for free Approver.com users to add more than one email address to their account (and Approver.com Pro users can add as many email addresses as they like). But we never really made it easy to take complete control over where and how you receive alerts.

Today we’ve fixed that. We’ve launched Email Preferences, a new feature of your Approver.com profile which enables you to specify in a very granular fashion how you receive email from Approver.com. Now you can go to your profile, click on Settings, and turn email alerts on and off for each email account you have in the system. You can also use email preferences to subscribe or unsubscribe from our sorta-kinda monthly Approver.com newsletter.

We want to make sure Approver.com saves you time and works the way you work. For some users, that means receiving up-to-the-minute alerts on document status. For other users, it means staying out of your inbox as much as possible. We hope this new feature gives you some flexibility and saves you time.

For more information about the different kinds of alerts that Approver.com sends, see our online help topic on alerts.

Mark Documents as Confidential

Over the years, we’ve found that companies have grown more fanatical about nondisclosure agreements. And rightly so: confidential knowledge is core to any business. But often, companies seem to pay more attention to the nondisclosure agreement itself than the actual notion of confidentiality. What does “confidential” mean to you? Does the document you just sent me fall under our nondisclosure agreement? If it’s not marked “Confidential,” there’s often no way of knowing, which can defeat the purpose of the agreement.

So today, we added features to Approver.com that enable you to explicitly mark a document as confidential. When you do this, a “Confidential” box appears at the top of the document review page, making it obvious to all reviewers of the document that you consider this document to be confidential.

We know that “Confidential” means different things to different people, so we provided three different flavors of Confidential flags:

• Confidential
• Confidential/NDA (for information released under the terms of a nondisclosure agreement)
• Confidential Attorney/Client Privilege (for information communicated between an attorney and a client)

You can mark a document as confidential on the document authoring page. (As you might expect, you can mark uploaded files as confidential too.)

The Private Flag Makes Security Simpler

Approver.com makes it easy to share your documents with anyone online in a secure way. But sometimes it’s difficult to know when a page you’re looking at online is accessible only to you, to your colleagues or to anyone on the web. (This is a usability problem that exists on a lot of web sites, we’ve found.)

You can always check on the review status of a document on the document review page. But we’ve had a few inquiries from users about ways to make it even more obvious that a document is accessible only to its author. Today we added a feature that does just that — we call it the Private Flag. The Private Flag is a grey box that appears at the top of the document review page:

The box appears only to the document author, and lets you know that the document is private — only viewable by you, the document author. If you invite someone to review the document, the Private Flag goes away to denote that the document is no longer private (but of course you can uninvite a reviewer at any time to make the document private again).

The easiest way to see how the Private Flag works is to create a document in the browser. You’ll see the Private Flag from the moment you create the document, and it’ll stay active until you invite someone to review that document.

Our hope is that this will give Approver.com users more control and information about their documents, making the site easier to use and understand at the same time.

Use Approver.com with Your iPhone or iPod Touch

We’ve added support for the iPhone and iPod Touch on Approver.com. You can now use your mobile device to check the status of documents as well as view your Approver.com contacts from almost anywhere.

To get started, point your iPhone or iPod touch browser to:

http://i.approver.com/

Sign in with your normal Approver.com user name and password. Feel free to explore and let us know if you have any questions or feedback.

Support for Microsoft Office 2007 Documents

One of the strengths of Approver.com is the fact that we let you work the way you want to. If you want to use our in-browser word processor to create and share documents online, you can do that. But if you want to share files created in the applications you’re accustomed to, such as Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, PhotoShop, or Framemaker, we’ve got you covered there, too.

Today we added support for the new file formats provided by Microsoft Office 2007. You can use Approver.com to upload and share documents created in Word 2007 (.docx), Powerpoint 2007 (.pptx) and Excel 2007 (.xlsx). To get started sharing uploaded files on Approver.com, visit our upload page, which contains a list of the two dozen uploadable file types we now support.

Associate More Email Addresses with your Approver.com Account

For some time now, Approver.com has given you the ability to associate more than one email address with your account. It’s handy, particularly if you answer to more than one email address (or if you’re changing jobs and need to change email addresses). The idea is to enable your colleagues to invite you to review a document no matter which email address they know you by.

You can associate a secondary email account with your Approver.com account by going to your Approver.com profile, entering the new email address, and verifying the address by clicking on a link in an email that we’ll send to your new address.

Approver.com Pro users can have up to 10 email addresses associated with their accounts. Today we relaxed the restriction on how many email addresses a free user can have. Users with a free Approver.com account can now have two email addresses associated with their account instead of just one. Also, today we fixed a bug with verification of secondary email addresses (we were sending the verification email to your old email address instead of your new one).

If you’ve been having trouble getting your email address(es) assigned to your Approver.com account properly, this should help. If not, as always, please leave us feedback.

Happy Birthday, Approver.com

Today the site celebrates its first birthday. In the past 365 days since the launch of Approver.com, we’ve signed up thousands of active users who have created and uploaded thousands of documents. We’ve engaged in countless valuable discussions with users about our feature set and future product roadmap, and we’ve picked up paid users in five countries (thank you!).

Thanks too to our network of friends and advisors who have shown such generosity and given us invaluable encouragement over the past year.

In the past year the site has evolved from a place to simply upload and share Microsoft Office documents into a more fully-featured workgroup application that teams all over the world are using every day to work smarter and communicate more effectively.

But we’re not done yet. In the coming months we’ll continue to roll out upgrades to Approver.com to make the site easier to use and more powerful. The list of things we want to do is long (more than 150 projects at last count), but the higher-priority features we’re planning include:

• The ability for users to administer the accounts of other users
• Support for more granular and intelligent alerting
• Better support for uploading and sharing video
• A better experience for uploading files, and the ability to upload and share larger files
• Better community and social networking features, including the ability to have richer discussions and shared discussions within workgroups
• Support for new document types (such as the calendar document template we released a few weeks ago)
• Integration with other services you use such as Plaxo and Facebook
• Improvements to our web service API to make the site more accessible to developers

Got an idea for what you’d like to see in Year 2 of Approver.com? Let us know.