Email Signatures

We pushed a new version of Approver.com this evening. If there was any downtime, it was infinitesimal.
We added one new feature and fixed a few bugs:

• You can now associate signatures with your profile. This feature is specifically for folks in regulated industries (such as finance and the legal profession) in which you are required to include a piece of legalese at the bottom of every email you send, for compliance or confidentiality reasons. If you supply a signature on your profile, we’ll append it to every email alert Approver.com sends out on your behalf. If you wish, you could also use this feature to append personal contact data to the bottom of your Approver.com email alerts.
• Inviting other users to edit documents wasn’t working in all cases. It’s now fixed.
• Requesting a document was working when you provided the recipient’s email address, but it wasn’t working when you used an Approver.com user name. Also fixed.
• When sending a file request, the system checked to see if you were allowed to create a new document (based on whether you have a Free or Pro account). We got rid of this check since we do it at the time the file requestor initially sends the request. This means if you weren’t able to respond to a file request in the past, you should be able to now.
• We got rid of the concept of the “author” of a document; now we just refer to the document’s owner. If you create documents, you’re still the owner, but when you request that someone else send you a document, they’re technically the “author” but once they send it to you, you become the owner. This is just a conceptual change and doesn’t affect how you work with Approver.
• Fixed pricing on upgrade page.

More Generous Storage Allowances

We just pushed a new version of the site that provides for more generous storage allowances for both free and paid users. This is the completion of a transition we’ve been working on since prior to the first of the year.

The new rules regarding storage are:

• Free users can now create one document per month.
• Paid Approver Pro users can create and publish any number of documents per month. Our plan is to provide some sort of reasonable upper limit on storage (probably 1 gigabyte to start with), but since none of our users are even close to that today, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

We’re also extending free Approver Pro trial accounts to most new users when they sign up, so you’ll have a month to see if Approver Pro is for you. We first started giving these free upgrades out over the holidays — if you missed your invitation, send us feedback and we’ll be happy to set you up with another trial month.

Publish Files to the Web

We did a production push this morning which went very smoothly (no downtime). This push adds a significant new feature for Approver users: the ability to publish a document to the Web for anyone to view.

When we were adding the ability to publish documents to a blog, we realized that general-purpose Web publishing was really what we should have been shooting for all along. So we added it to the publishing flow we originally created for blog publishing. Now when you go to your Publish page, in addition to any blogs you may have configured, you’ll see a new option (“The Web”). Files you publish to the Web are copied to a Web server that anyone can access. If you want to embed an image or other file into a message board, blog or HTML email, we provide the code for that as well. You can view a list of all the documents you’ve published and you can easily take down a public file anytime you wish.

We should mention that files you publish using Approver.com are hosted by our good pals at Amazon.com. We’re taking advantage of a super-cool Amazon product called S3 which gives us the ability to publish your Approver.com data using Amazon’s infrastructure. Suffice it to say that Amazon’s infrastructure is mighty mighty, and without it we probably would not have been able to provide this feature in an economical way for our users.

Share FrameMaker Documents on Approver.com

We had a user request for FrameMaker document support, so we added it to our list and pushed it live just now. You can now upload documents in the FrameMaker (.FM) format and share them with colleagues on Approver.com.

Production Push 5. Feb 2007

We did another little push this morning to add a new feature: document requests. The idea here is to give Approver users the ability to ask someone else to send them a file using Approver.

To do a document request:

• Go to the create page (or click on the Create link at the top of any page)
• Click on Request
• Type the email address of the person you want to send the file (the person doesn’t have to be a member of Approver.com)
• Click on Send Request

After you send the request, the recipient will receive an email from Approver.com with a special link to click. After they click the link, Approver will automatically know that the file should be routed to you (the other user doesn’t have to type in your email address or user name, which makes it less likely that they’ll misspell it).

After the upload is done, the file will appear in your My Documents queue. You’ll have ownership of the file, and the person who sent you the file will be added as a reviewer and editor (in case they need to upload additional revisions to the document later). Finally, when the other user has uploaded the file, you’ll receive an email alert from Approver to let you know that the file is ready for your review.

We did this feature as a result of a request from an Approver.com user. If you have any feature requests or other feedback for us, please let us know.