Quotes on Approver.com

I posted a new quotes page summarizing what users and reviewers are saying about Approver.

I pushed a few very minor bug fixes this morning but we didn’t do a full push because we’re still trying to get some new functionality just right. We should have a new push on Sunday or Monday.

Terms of Use and Privacy Policy Now Up

Our fabulous attorney has vetted the legalese, so we’ve posted the official Approver.com Terms of Use and Privacy Policy on the site.

These are a very slightly modified version of the WordPress.com terms, which Matt and crew have usefully made available under a Creative Commons license. Thanks, muchachos!

After our next production push (which we’re hoping to do on Saturday as usual) these pages will be accessible from the bottom of every page on the site.

Calling all Yahoo! Widgets Users

If you’re a user of Approver.com and you’re also a user of Yahoo! Widgets (aka Konfabulator) on either Windows or Mac, we’ve got something fun for you to try. Leave feedback or post in the comments below and we’ll hook you up.

Howdy Russia!

Here is a slice of my life: I wake up, check my email, see who’s registered for Approver, realize that we’ve gotten a half-dozen people from some new exotic international locale sign up in the last few hours, then it’s off to Technorati to figure out which international blogger has linked to the site. :)

This morning it’s Russia, hooray! And a pretty good review if Babelfish’s translation is any indication (he says “It is actually convenient – it substitutes sending email with the attachments (that that usually it is used with the agreement)”. Couldn’t have put it any better myself.

Production Push 23. September 2006

Just did a production push to fix a few very minor bugs and add two action-packed new features:

• Better management of contacts. Having a contact list is handy because it enables you to invite document reviewers with just a few clicks. Previously, you could only add contacts indirectly, when you invited someone to review or approve a document. Now it’s possible to add someone to your contacts without inviting them to review a document. You can also edit the names and email addresses of people in your list of contacts.
• At-a-glance approval status. It’s now possible to view a document’s aggregate approval status without having to scan through the reviewer list and do the math yourself. This means that if you invite, say, eighteen people to approve a document and nine of them have approved, Approver will simply tell you that nine of eighteen people have approved. Solid! Thanks to Tom for suggesting this feature.

Approver.com Review in VentureBeat

Matt Marshall just posted a terrific review of Approver on his VentureBeat blog. Thanks Matt!

Where We’re Going with the API

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned either here or on my personal blog that we’re going to have an API for Approver.com soon. After mulling it over for a few weeks, I’ve settled on rolling this out in three phases.

First, I want to release some kind of client application that utilizes our API before we make the API itself generally available. This will (99% certainty) be a Yahoo Widget for Approver.com alerting. You’ll be able to install this on your desktop and it’ll tell you when you need to come back to Approver.com to review or approve a document. I did some design work on this widget last night and I have to say that the ratio of its appearance to my feeble design skills is fairly high. (Fortunately if you don’t like the way it works, you’ll be more or less free to remix and re-engineer it to your liking, which is the whole point of having an API.)

After we’ve released the alerting widget, we’ll make some read-only APIs available. This will include the call used by the widget to retrieve your list of actionable documents, and it will also include some calls we’ll need for secure authentication and authorization (we are going to use the same kind of scheme that eBay, Flickr, and others use to authenticate users through third-party applications without having to share user credentials with third-party developers).

Finally, after we’re comfortable with how we’ve made our initial read-only APIs available, we’ll release some read/write APIs (such as the ability to approve a document programmatically, invite users to review documents, and possibly also upload/edit documents).

I want to approach this conservatively because I won’t want to release something then find myself having to change it after developers have started using because something about it wasn’t quite right.

If you’re a coder and you’d like early access to any of this, please let us know.

Production push 16 September 2006

Just did a production push which went well (no downtime). Most of the changes and fixes were things that users suggested over the last week and a half. They include:

• Removed display of the login panel from the home page if you’re already logged in
• Added the ability to increase the vertical size of the edit box on the document page
• Added support for uploading .SWF files (Flash movies and FlashPaper documents)
• Several changes to enhance the usability and visibility of document deadlines (as previously announced)
• As previously announced, we added Microformats (hCard) support to your contacts page

Much of what we worked on this week is behind-the-scenes plumbing that falls into two categories — reporting functionality to make it easier for us to see how people are using the site, and API functionality to make it possible for developers to eventually build software applications that integrate with Approver.com (such as desktop widgets and integration with content systems). This is a high priority for us and we’ll be talking more about it in coming weeks.

Better deadline management on the way

A few people have given us feedback on the concept of document deadlines, which were pretty unpolished in our first public release. You could set a deadline and that deadline would appear next to the document on your My Documents page, but that was pretty much it.

We took out the belt sander and ground down some rough edges with deadlines this week. (These changes will appear when we do our next push on Saturday morning.) Here’s what got improved:

• When you are the document author and you set a deadline using the calendar in document.aspx, it’s now obvious that a deadline has been set (the deadline is highlighted in red on the calendar)
• When you are an approver and the document’s author has set a deadline, you can see right next to the approval button when the deadline is and how many days you have until the deadline
• We made deadlines clearer on the My Documents page for documents that have them

Why Doesn’t Approver Email Documents?

We’ve had one or two questions from new users on the theme of why we want people to come to the web site to review and approve documents — since we’re sending out email alerts anyway, why not just attach the document to that email?

There are a bunch of reasons why Approver.com doesn’t email the document to reviewers:

1. Emailing documents is not secure. Every piece of email you receive is typically bounced off several mail servers on the way to your inbox; you have no way of knowing whether your attachments are being snarfed by these intermediary mail servers. If you are sharing confidential documents by sending them as email attachments today, you are running a risk.
2. When you mail a document, the sender has no way of knowing whether a document ever got there (it could have been eaten by a spam filter or removed by a corporate firewall, etc., but you would never know this). With Approver, you can see who has viewed the document and exactly how long ago they viewed it. Providing this information to the author would not be possible if we mailed it out.
3. Having your inbox filled with documents and comments on those documents is (in our opinion) a terrible user experience. Document collaboration is simply not what an email inbox was designed for. The Approver.com vision is to have a single web page that you can get to from anywhere (not just your inbox) that contains the document and all the data associated with that document (such as the list of reviewers and comments).

Ciao Italy!

Should have mentioned when I saluted our friends in Japan that there is a sizable Italian contingent of Approvers as well. Here’s a review from an Italian blog dedicated to web design and content management.

The international uptake is making me think hard about raising the priority of localization for Approver; we’d planned to start work on this in Milestone 4, but we could do it sooner. Would a version of the site that’s been localized into your language make it easier for you to use Approver? If we made it easy for users to contribute translated text, would you contribute translated text?

Welcome, Japanese Approvers!

It looks like we are getting a little bump in new signups from our friends in Japan this evening, probably as a result of a review on a Japanese blog somewhere (maybe this one?).

This reminds me of the first time one of my books was translated into a language like Chinese or Hebrew that I couldn’t begin to read. I find it exciting and amazing, really, that your work can go around the world like this.

The blog review that I linked to up there refers to the site as 文書の承認に特化したサービス。which Babelfish translates as “the service which is specialized in the approval of the document.” Awesome!

Making Approver store documents in UTF-8 wasn’t terrifically difficult but it did require some configuration fidgeting in MySQL and some testing which my pal Howard helped out with (thanks!). Storing data in UTF-8 is actually one of the few things that Microsoft SQL Server makes easier/more obvious than MySQL (in SQL Server, UTF-8 is a distinct data type, while in MySQL it’s a configuration setting that’s easy to miss).

Update: Here’s another Japanese review of the site. I can’t trust Babelfish translations 100% but this review seems like it may be not quite as positive as the one I linked to previously? Not sure. We are continuing to see a healthy stream of new users from our friends in Japan, though, which is nice.

Microformats Madness

The next release of Approver.com (which I’ll probably push out on Monday or Tuesday) will contain our first support for microformats. Specifically, I changed the way we display the contacts list so it conforms to the hCard format. You won’t notice any difference in this page unless you’re using a tool that detects the presence of microformats, but if you’re using a microformats-enabled tool (such as the Tails Firefox Extension), your tool will be able to parse individual contacts.

Production push Sept 10 2006

Burned the midnight oil on Saturday night to finish a feature that several users (including my wife) had requested this week — the ability to upload a new version of an uploaded file.

Now when you upload a file to be reviewed/approved, you can denote that one or more of your reviewers can upload new versions of the file. When someone uploads a new version of the file, you (the original author of the file) will receive an email alert. You can always see who uploaded the latest version of the file and when they uploaded it.

Enjoy! And as always, please leave feedback if you notice any funnies or have any suggestions.

How to Use Approver.com to Review Confidential Documents

Approver.com is a way to review and approve documents that is more secure and convenient than sending around email attachments. Since our launch, we’re received a few emails from Approver.com users asking about using Approver for more confidential documents — documents that absolutely cannot under any circumstances leave your corporate intranet. It’s definitely possible to do this with Approver.com today. Here’s how.

• Post the document to your corporate intranet or content management system as you normally would. Copy the URL of this document; you’ll need it later.
• In Approver.com, create a new document. When Approver asks you what kind of document you want to create, select “I want to create and edit a document in my browser”
• You’ll be taken to the new document page. In the Title box, type the title of the document. In the Document Body box, paste the URL of the document on your intranet you created in the first step, contained in angle brackets. The pasted-in URL should look something like this:

<http://my.intranet.com/documents/my.doc>

Save the document and invite reviewers as you normally would. The reviewers will be able to see a link to the real document in your Approver.com page. This gives them access to most of Approver.com’s goodness such as comments and alerts without having to give up a lot in terms of privacy or confidentiality.

The Invite-Register-Approve Experience

I’ve had literally dozens of terrific conversations with new Approver.com users over the past few days. I’ve tried to make a point of greeting every new user personally in email (sorry if I missed you — I got busy during the day yesterday and might have missed a few, but I was up until 1:30am last night sending and answering emails to new users).

Gratifyingly, almost none of the conversations were questions about what Approver.com was good for or how to use a feature. Nearly all the conversations were about new features people would like to see, or minor modifications to existing features.

I had a few conversations with users about the Approver.com registration process, specifically about what happens when you invite someone to review a document. I wanted to describe that process in a little detail, because a lot of thought went into that and there’s some subtlety there that you might miss if you signed up for Approver without having been invited by someone else.

The simplest way to invite someone to review a document is to simply pick their name from your contacts list (this is illustrated on the Approver.com Guided Tour located here). Obviously, this only works if you’ve interacted with that user before: Users are added to your contacts list when you invite them to review a document or when they invite you to review a document. (By the way, there’s no mindless “Invite” feature in Approver.com as there is in a lot of social networking applications — this is by design. The best way invite a user to use Approver.com is to simply invite them to review a document.)

When you invite someone to review a document and they’re not registered on the system, a special flow is kicked off. We first send the a user an email that explains in very simple terms what Approver.com is, who you are and what you’re asking them to do. Then we provide a special link for the reviewer/approver to click on.
After the invited user clicks on the special link, they’re taken to the registration page. At this point, we already know what their email address is (because you, the author, have supplied it for us), so we fill that in automatically. So reviewers/approvers need only provide three pieces of information to start using Approver.com: their name, a user name, and a password. Note too that invited users don’t need to go through the email verification step either. And, of course, reviewers/approvers don’t need to pay anything to review or approve a document created by you.

What happens if the invited user doesn’t click on the special link they receive in email? If they go straight to the Approver.com registration page, they’ll still get your document placed in their “Action Required” folder, but only if they used the same email address to register that you used to invite them. Right now, users with two different email addresses look like two different people to us (although there’s a project on our road map to resolve that — you’ll be able to add multiple email addresses to your account so no matter which address people use for you, invitations to review documents will all go to the same place).

As I posted earlier, a formal, legal set of terms of use and privacy policy are on the way. But for now, we absolutely and fanatically commit to never selling or giving away your email address to third parties.

Production Push 7. September 2006

Just did a little push to hopefully quash once and for all the last vestige of the bug that caused intermittent slowness on Wednesday morning. Also added a new feature: you can now upload Photoshop and EPS files. (This required so little work that it shouldn’t really count as a feature, but someone requested it today, so I thought I’d toss it in with the push I was planning on doing anyway.)

By the way, thanks to everyone for all the terrific feedback from new users we’ve gotten over the  past day and a half. We keep that information around in our big feature request database, and as you can see from tonight’s push if the request is easy we can often bang it out real quick-like.

Finally, a big howdy to those of you who are finding us from the del.icio.us popular links page. Apparently, people are linking to Approver.com. That is to be encouraged.

Site is healthy

Should have posted this earlier, but the aforementioned problems accessing the site are now resolved and the site appears very healthy, with (a bunch of) new users signing up and creating documents normally.

I was originally worried that this was one of those all-night outages since I noticed the site was behaving weirdly when I first woke up, but looking at the logs, it looks like things started going pear-shaped at about 7AM Pacific. So the total outage lasted less than an hour (and even that was just a partial outage — some users couldn’t get through at all, while others who could get to the site reported slow performance).

No data was lost in this outage.

Production push 6. September 2006

I’m pushing a fix for the aforementioned bug to production now, it should up up in a minute or so. Hopefully after that the site will be more responsive.

Stress Testing

We’ve picked up some load this morning because of a review on Om Malik’s blog last night. Good news for the business, bad news for the site, as the additional load has exposed a bug having to do with MySQL connection management.

If you’re trying to register or log in at the moment and not having any luck, apologies. I am pretty sure I know where the problem is so I’ll be doing a production push to fix it within a half-hour or so.