Improved Comment Alerts

We just rolled out an improvement in the way we do comment alerts. (A comment alert is the email you receive when someone comments on one of your documents.)

In the past, when a reviewer commented on one of your documents, you (the document owner) would receive a single comment alert. You would then receive another comment alert when someone else commented on the document.

As of today, the document owner, as well as all the document reviewers, will now receive a comment alert when someone posts a comment to a document. This makes comment alerting work the way that people intuitively expect — it turns document comments into more of a team collaboration instead of a bunch of isolated drive-by conversations between the author and each individual reviewer.

To prevent this from generating an unwieldy number of alerts, we won’t send you a  comment alert if you haven’t viewed the document since the last time you received a comment alert on that document. This means that in some situations you may get fewer comment alerts overall (to avoid bombarding your inbox with comment alerts for documents you don’t really care about), but you’ll get more timely comment alerts on the documents you care about most.

Introducing Approver.com Calendars

Approver.com is a great way to share unstructured documents created in the browser as well as files you create on your computer. Many Approver.com users have asked for the ability to create more structured documents, such as calendars and task lists, using Approver.com.

Today we’ve released a feature that make it easy to create and share structured documents. With Approver.com Calendars, you can create a day planner-style document with a list of dates and information you supply.

We generate the formatted list of dates for you and convert the whole thing into an Approver.com document. You can then fill in the blanks in the editor next to each date. If you like, you can invite colleagues to edit, review and approve your schedule.

The best part: a calendar is just another kind of Approver.com document, so you can use our in-browser editor to modify the calendar, then share the document with others the same way you do with other Approver.com documents today. You can even publish the calendar to the web so anyone can view it.

Click here to create an Approver.com calendar.

Improvements to Contact Management

We just released a minor update to Approver.com to make some improvements to contact management. Specifically:

• If any of your contacts haven’t yet signed up for Approver.com, you can now invite them with a single click. We’ll send the contact an email instructing them just what to do to start using Approver.com, and we’ll even supply their email address on the registration form so they don’t have to type it themselves.
• Some users were having trouble with our contact management importer, which we originally released back in May. Those issues should be resolved now.
• We added a bit of polish to the My Contacts page as well as the page you use to enter contacts manually.

Embedding Widgets in Approver.com Documents

Some of our users have asked if it’s possible embed videos into Approver.com documents, or whether you can work with larger file types that we don’t support today (such as video, MP3s, ZIP files, and so forth).

Until we reach the nirvana of unlimited storage and file types for all of our users, many of today’s limitations of Approver.com can be overcome through the use of widgets. Widgets are bits of code that you can copy and paste into an Approver.com document that give you access to data or functionality from another web site.

We’ve had success sharing data from YouTube, Revver and Box.net in Approver.com documents, so we decided to provide details about how this works for our users. Read more about using Approver.com with widgets in the Approver.com help center.

Document Revisions

In addition to the improvements to workgroup functionality we made available in today’s Approver.com release, we also released a brand new feature: document revisions.

With document revisions, you can view old versions of a document. This feature works both for files you upload to Approver.com as well as documents you create in the browser, and it works no matter who makes the edit or uploads the new version of the file. This means you can use the document revision page to see who edited the document and when.

To view document revisions, click on the “View revisions” link on the upper-right side of the document review page. You may notice that some of your existing documents have revisions available already (we’ve been storing document revisions for you for a while now, we just haven’t made it available in the user interface until today).

If you’re an Approver.com Pro user, you can view all revisions of your document (subject to our standard storage limits for paid users). Users with free Approver.com accounts can view the first and most recent revisions of a document. Upgrade to Approver.com Pro to get access to all of your document revisions.

Workgroup Update

We just rolled out a new version of Approver.com. Included in today’s release are some improvements to the workgroup feature we debuted two weeks ago. In this release, you can now have more than one workgroup administrator if you like. It’s easy to promote or demote a workgroup user to a workgroup administrator (just click on the Settings link next to the user’s name on the workgroup page). Of course, only the workgroup creator and other workgroup administrators can promote a user to workgroup administrator. Administrators can add or remove users and documents to and from the workgroup.

You now also have the ability to denote that a particular workgroup user should be an approver (instead of just a reviewer) of documents that are added to the workgroup.

We’ve added a new page that lets you view or change a workgroup member’s settings. This page gives you the ability to promote the user to a workgroup administrator, designate them as a workgroup approver, and remove the member from the workgroup. To get to this page, go to the workgroup’s page and click on the “Settings” link next to the workgroup member’s name.

In addition to these new features, we added some user interface polish to workgroups, and resolved some issues that a few users had with adding certain documents and members to their workgroups. In particular, adding a member to a workgroup who hasn’t yet registered with Approver.com was not always working properly and in some cases was making it impossible to add new documents to a workgroup — this should be resolved now.