Another Tragic Example of Document-Sharing with Email Attachments

Microsoft’s public relations agency sent a confidential briefing about a journalist…to the journalist. Accidentally. Oops.

Having done some corporate PR in the past, we suspect that sharing documents as email attachments may be to blame here. The Wired magazine reporter writes about what happened on his blog.

It’s much more difficult for this to happen to Approver.com users because Approver lets you invite only those people you select to review a document (so, unlike the way you add people to the CC line on an email, inviting document reviewers is more explicit).

The document owner can prohibit reviewers from adding other reviewers — another feature we provide to prevent the reviewer list from getting out of hand.
The document owner can also withdraw permission to view a document on Approver.com at any time, so if you do make a boo-boo and invite someone to review a document that you shouldn’t have, you have a chance to fix it.

Reviewers Inviting Reviewers

When we first created Approver.com it was intended to be a simple solution for the mess that happens when people try to use email as a document workflow tool. One of the many unfortunate things that happens in email is when you want to share a document with, say, one or two trusted colleagues and one of them forwards the email to fifteen other people, causing a gigantic conversational train wreck in your inbox (and kicking off a discussion about a document that perhaps shouldn’t have been broadly circulated yet).

Because of this, we originally only permitted the author to invite reviewers to view a document. This worked pretty well, but some folks wanted more flexibility — they wanted to enable their reviewers to invite other people to review your document, just like you can in email. So tonight we made some changes to Approver.com that enable you to do just that.

Here are the details:

• You’ll see a new link on the document page that lets you turn reviewers-inviting-reviewers on or off for that document
• All newly-created documents will have “reviewers can invite reviewers” on by default (but you can easily turn it off)
• All previously existing documents still adhere to the old rules (only the document creator can invite reviewers)
• Reviewers can invite others to review documents when the document owner permits it, but reviewers can’t invite others to be editors or approvers (only the document owner can do that)
• The document owner can still remove a reviewer from the document at any time

In addition to making the feature available for people who want to use it, we’re hoping this will make it easier for you to share the Approver.com goodness with your colleagues. As always, if you have any questions about this or any other aspect of Approver.com, feel free to leave feedback or comment here.

Improved Publishing

When we first released Publish to Web functionality it was intended to be a simple and quick way to put a document online. Today we polished the publishing feature a bit specifically for documents you create in the browser and subsequently publish to the web.

Documents you publish to the web from Approver now have full HTML headers (before we were only publishing HTML bodies, which worked in modern browsers but wasn’t really technically correct). We’ve also started including a default style sheet (which you can override with inline formatting if you want) as well as an Approver.com header that makes it easy for you or the viewers of your document to get back to Approver.com to make changes or whatever.

You can see an example of a document that’s been published to the web using Approver here. This is the sample document we use for demos as well as for testing our editing and publishing functionality.