Production Push 28. October 2006

We just pushed a new version of the site. The push went very smoothly considering how much we changed (total downtime was a little less than six minutes). Here’s what’s new today:

• Completely redesigned the My Documents page (as previously announced). We removed some of the whizzy dynamic cruft on this page and added the ability to see all your documents without clicking on anything; also added the ability to sort by document name or status.
• Redesigned the Create a Document page (also previously announced).
• On the Create a Document page, we added the ability to create a linked document (a document that you review on Approver but that resides on your intranet or elsewhere on the web).
• Added some minor design flair to the user profile page and the Document page.
• We updated one of our user interface libraries which should translate into better performance for certain operations such as removing a document from your My Documents page and adding comments to a document. (For the technical-minded among you, we’re using ASP.NET Ajax beta 1 now.)
• Fixed a couple of minor bugs pertaining to inviting users to review a document (in some very rare cases, the review wasn’t being auto-added to your contacts).

As always, if you spot any funnies, please leave a comment here or use our feedback form.

A New My Documents Page

Since we launched, we’ve received some terrific feedback on the design of the site. Design is one of those things that a lot of people have strong feelings about but can’t always articulate well (and we’ve been there, too, at one time or another — putting “look and feel” into words is sometimes tricky). Some folks have said that our user experience is terrific, others have said that they want more curved corners, glaring reflections and other Ajax glitz.

Approver’s design principles, such as they are, go something like this: “Do the simplest thing that could possibly work, and don’t agonize over minutiae, but be prepared to change it if more than one or two people complain.” (Our other big design principle is “rounded corners have been done to death” but that’s a subject for another day.)

Anyway, the design of the My Documents page is something that caused more than two people to send us befuddled feedback. So this week, we took it out back and had it shot. Its replacement (which will appear in our regularly-scheduled push tomorrow morning) is better in every possible way. It doesn’t jump around when you load the page; it gives you a nice simple, sortable list of your documents; and the new version is less complicated and is a bit faster to load than the old version.

Since the My Documents page is where heavy-duty users of Approver.com spend most of their time, we realize it’s important to get this right, so we’ll continue to take a look at this page with an eye toward making it easier to use and more informative.

Support for linked documents

This weekend we will roll out support for linked documents. Linked documents are useful when you want to use Approver.com to do workflow on a document that absolutely, positively cannot leave your corporate LAN. You might also use a linked document in a situation where you already have a document on the Web (or your intranet) that you want colleagues to review and approve.

When we first launched, a few users asked us if it was possible to use Approver to review a Writely (now “Google Docs & Spreadsheets“) document, or a Zoho Writer document (etc.) using Approver. Linked documents make that easy.

It’s actually been possible to use Approver to link to files all along, it’s just that now we’re providing explicit support for it in the Approver flow and making it very simple to do. The ability to link to an existing document will also become a new option on the Create a document page (which also got a bit of a facelift this week).

Linked documents will be available when we do our regularly-scheduled push this Saturday.

How to Use Approver.com with GMail

By far, the biggest single email host used by Approver.com users is GMail. So we wanted to provide some tips on how to get the most out of Approver.com if you’re using Gmail.

With any system that sends email alerts to its users, the biggest Achilles heel is your spam filter. (You can get around the limitations of email and spam filtering by using the Approver.com RSS feed or the Approver.com desktop widget instead of email, but email is certainly handy, so it’s worthwhile to spend a few minutes setting up GMail so you never miss an Approver.com alert.)

The first step is to add Approver.com alerts to your GMail contacts. To do this:

• In GMail, click on Contacts on the left side of the page.
• Click on the Add Contact link on the upper right side of the page.
• In the Name box, type Approver.com Alerts.
• In the Primary Email box, type alerts@approver.com.

• Click on the Save button.

The next step is to highlight alert emails that are sent from Approver. To do this, we’ll create a filter. From your GMail inbox, click on the “Create a filter” link (this link is at the top of the page next to the right of the “Search the Web” button).

The Create a Filter panel appears. In the From box, type “alerts@approver.com”, then click on the “Next Step” button.

In the next step, you’ll specify what you want GMail to do when it receives an Approver.com alert. Check the box labeled “Star it,” then click on Create Filter.

That’s it! Emails from Approver.com will have a happy golden star next to them when they appear in your GMail inbox and alerts shouldn’t be spam-filtered.

Outage 23. October 2006

We had a partial outage of the site this morning due to a misconfiguration associated with last night’s push. (We now remember why we don’t do production pushes at midnight on Sunday.) The site itself was up, but some core functionality (notably, viewing documents) was down. However, no data was lost and things appear to be working fine now.

Production Push 23. October 2006

We don’t normally do production pushes late Sunday night but this one was pretty minor (it wasn’t technically a full production push since only a few files changed).

One big change you’ll notice is a feature that a few of you had requested since we launched — a menu bar at the top of each page. The menu gives you one-click access to the most important pages on the site (My Documents, My Profile, My Contacts, create a document, upload a document, feedback, and upgrade).

Production Push 21. October 2006

Just did our regularly scheduled Saturday production push. It looks like everything went as planned with no glitches or downtime. Here’s what’s new:

• We’ve added the ability for paid Approver Pro users to add multiple email addresses to their accounts, as previously announced.
• Added support for uploading OpenOffice spreadsheets, word processing documents and presentations, as previously announced.
• Added code to prevent more than one new user from registering with the same email address. This was a requirement imposed on us by the addition of the multiple email address per account feature.
• Added the ability to send new kinds of reminders to users via email. A reminder is a kind of administrative alert. For example, when you register for the system but don’t verify your email address, we want to send you a reminder to let you know that you’ve got one more step left before you can use Approver. In the future we’ll add other kinds of reminders (such as a reminder the day before a document with a deadline is due). At the same time we’re trying to be very sensitive to ensure that this system does not bombard you with a lot of email you do not want (for example, the administrative alert asking you to complete your verification at registration time will only send you email once).

We did notice one minor funny after we pushed. One of the use cases we wanted to support with multiple email addresses was the notion of adding your mobile phone as an alternate email address for folks whose wireless carriers have SMS to email gateways. This doesn’t work right now because the verification email we send out is getting eaten (because of the limit on the length of SMS messages). We will take a look at this in the next week or so and figure out a way to resolve this. (In the meantime, if you’re a Pro user and you’re itching to add your SMS email address to your Approver account, let us know and we’ll validate it manually for you.)

Buzzshout Interview

A few weeks ago the Buzzshout guys sat down with Jeffrey to talk about Approver. They just posted the interview; you can view it here. (It’s on video…very fancy. Can you tell how much Jeffrey hates to be on video?)

Support for multiple email addresses

The ability to have more than one email address associated with your account is something that a few users have asked for since we launched last month. This weekend we will be pushing out this functionality.

Because sending out email alerts is a potential abuse vector and it’s also one of the more expensive things we do, there will likely be some kind of limit on email addresses that we’ll figure out this week. In all likelihood Free users will have to get by with a single email address while paid Pro users will be able to add as many email addresses they want (within reason).

There are two handy use cases that multiple email addresses support. The first pertains to alerts: if you want us to send an email to your desktop as well as your mobile phone (etc.) when a document is approved, having multiple email addresses associated with your account lets you do that. The second has to do with invitations. When someone knows you by more than one email address, they might send an invitation to review a document to one email address on one day and another email address at some other point. Having all your email addresses associated with your Approver account makes sure that everything comes to the same place and prevents you from having to rifle through multiple inboxes to figure out where that important document got sent.

One of the side effects of the work on email addresses that took place this week had to do with registration and validation. We needed to update the email validation system (the thing that sends you out an email to verify that the email address you registered with really belongs to you). Now email validation can happen at any time (since you can have multiple email addresses associated with your account), so we expanded the email validation system to accomodate that.

Along with the new support for OpenOffice file uploads, this functionality should appear in our regularly scheduled push this Saturday.

Approver.com [Hearts] OpenOffice.org

Just checked in support for OpenOffice.org file uploads. This means if you’re using the free OpenOffice suite to create documents, spreadsheets or presentations, you can use Approver.com to share and collaborate on these documents with co-workers. (Or, you will be able to do this once we do our regularly-scheduled production push this Saturday.)

This is a feature that a few users had asked us for since we launched and we’re happy to make it available. If you’ve got other file formats you’d like to see Approver support, please let us know.

No push this weekend

We’re going to skip our normal weekend push this week, since none of the stuff we worked on this week is user-facing except for the bug fixes which we pushed earlier in the week.

Approver Reviewed in CNET

CNET’s Rafe Needleman says: “Approver is a clear-headed and cost-effective solution to a nagging workflow issue. It’s certainly a better tool for tracking the document approval cycle than e-mail, and it’s worth trying.”

We could not have hoped for a better review. Thanks so much, Rafe!

Read the full review here.

Bug fix 10. October 2006

Just pushed a bug fix to the main document page. This fix resolves an issue that was making it difficult to download files in some cases. Also resolved a related bug that made it appear as if a document wasn’t being deleted in some cases.

Production Push 7. October 2006

This morning we pushed a new version of the site. The push was uneventful with no downtime, just the way we like it.

This push contains the changes to the reviewer invitation system that we described yesterday. This means that you can now invite multiple reviewers at once, as well as inviting reviewers by first and last name if they’re already in your contacts.

Improvements in Invitations and Reviewer Status

In the Approver.com push that is scheduled for this weekend we’ll be making improvements in the way you can invite people to review your documents. It’ll also be easier to see who you’ve invited to review a document, particularly in the case where the person you’ve invited isn’t yet an Approver.com user.

In the screen shot above, registered Approver.com users have hyperlinked user names that take you to their Approver.com profiles. Users without links haven’t registered for the site yet.
Today you can invite anyone with an email address to review a document on Approver.com. You can also invite people by typing in their Approver.com user name, or you can pick them from your list of contacts. If you invite someone who hasn’t registered on the site yet, we send them an email inviting them to register so they can review your document. This will continue to be the case in the future (inviting a colleague to review a document is the best way to introduce them to Approver.com).

Several users have asked for easier ways to invite reviewers. Previously we only enabled you to invite reviewers one at a time. In this weekend’s push you’ll be able to invite a bunch of people all at once, which should make the process of inviting much better. In addition, you’ll be able to invite people from your contacts by typing in their first and last name, regardless of whether they’ve signed up for Approver.com or not.

One other thing that’s going into this weekend’s push is enforcement of the invitation limit for free users. Previously we’d stated that users with free accounts could only invite a limited number of reviewers. (This limit exists both as an anti-abuse tactic as well as an incentive to encourage users to upgrade to a paid account.) Until this weekend, that limit wasn’t actually enforced. After this weekend, this limit will be enforced. So if you think you’ll need to circulate documents to more than three people, now’s the time to upgrade.

Approver in Red Herring

Jeffrey demoed Approver.com at the Silicon Valley NewTech Meetup in Palo Alto on Tuesday night. Red Herring covered the meeting and got a terrific photo of the side of Jeffrey’s head. (Also a great review of the site.)

Approver.com Desktop Widget Now Available

We just released a handy new tool for users of Approver.com. It’s a desktop widget that makes it easy to see when you have documents to review.

With the widget, you don’t have to rely upon the vagaries of email for important alerts. And helpfully, the widget shrinks down real small when you don’t have any documents to review, so it doesn’t take up a lot of space on your desktop unless it’s trying to tell you something.

The widget is free for users of Approver.com (which is, in itself, free, so basically we’re talking extremely free here). Even better, it runs on both Windows and Macintosh, thanks to the cross-platform goodness of the Yahoo! Widget Engine (which you’ll need to install on your computer before you can run the widget — the simple, quick instructions explain everything you need to do).

Update: This just went up on the Yahoo! Widget Gallery. The gallery is handy because it gives you a place to rate and review widgets, so if you’re using this and you have comments you’d like to pass on to other widgeteers, here’s your chance.

Production push 1. October 2006

We just took a brief outage to push a new version of the site. This week’s push adds the following features and fixes:

• Approval by proxy. This gives document authors the ability to mark a document as approved on behalf of others. We included this at the request of a workgroup that is using a combination of paper signatures and online approvals. Note that documents you approve on behalf of others are specially marked as having been approved by you.
• Fixed a problem where downloading a file with spaces in its name would replace those spaces with plus signs.