Approver.com Update, 21. Nov 2007

We pushed out a new version of the site this morning to resolve a few issues that came up following our last upgrade on Sunday. The fixes mostly had to do with workgroups, contacts and inviting users to review documents, so if you ran into anything strange with those features in the last day and a half or so, it should be fixed now.

As always, if you have any questions about the site or problems you’d like help with, we’re always just a few clicks away.

Take Control of Your Email Alerts

When Approver.com launched, we provided a single kind of email alert (the one you receive when someone invites you to review a new document). This alert could only be sent to a single email address (the one you used when you registered). It wasn’t easy to change your email address. It was impossible for a user to have more than one email address. And if you wanted to turn email alerts on or off, you were out of luck, which frustrated a few of our users.

Over the past year, we made it possible for free Approver.com users to add more than one email address to their account (and Approver.com Pro users can add as many email addresses as they like). But we never really made it easy to take complete control over where and how you receive alerts.

Today we’ve fixed that. We’ve launched Email Preferences, a new feature of your Approver.com profile which enables you to specify in a very granular fashion how you receive email from Approver.com. Now you can go to your profile, click on Settings, and turn email alerts on and off for each email account you have in the system. You can also use email preferences to subscribe or unsubscribe from our sorta-kinda monthly Approver.com newsletter.

We want to make sure Approver.com saves you time and works the way you work. For some users, that means receiving up-to-the-minute alerts on document status. For other users, it means staying out of your inbox as much as possible. We hope this new feature gives you some flexibility and saves you time.

For more information about the different kinds of alerts that Approver.com sends, see our online help topic on alerts.

Mark Documents as Confidential

Over the years, we’ve found that companies have grown more fanatical about nondisclosure agreements. And rightly so: confidential knowledge is core to any business. But often, companies seem to pay more attention to the nondisclosure agreement itself than the actual notion of confidentiality. What does “confidential” mean to you? Does the document you just sent me fall under our nondisclosure agreement? If it’s not marked “Confidential,” there’s often no way of knowing, which can defeat the purpose of the agreement.

So today, we added features to Approver.com that enable you to explicitly mark a document as confidential. When you do this, a “Confidential” box appears at the top of the document review page, making it obvious to all reviewers of the document that you consider this document to be confidential.

We know that “Confidential” means different things to different people, so we provided three different flavors of Confidential flags:

• Confidential
• Confidential/NDA (for information released under the terms of a nondisclosure agreement)
• Confidential Attorney/Client Privilege (for information communicated between an attorney and a client)

You can mark a document as confidential on the document authoring page. (As you might expect, you can mark uploaded files as confidential too.)

The Private Flag Makes Security Simpler

Approver.com makes it easy to share your documents with anyone online in a secure way. But sometimes it’s difficult to know when a page you’re looking at online is accessible only to you, to your colleagues or to anyone on the web. (This is a usability problem that exists on a lot of web sites, we’ve found.)

You can always check on the review status of a document on the document review page. But we’ve had a few inquiries from users about ways to make it even more obvious that a document is accessible only to its author. Today we added a feature that does just that — we call it the Private Flag. The Private Flag is a grey box that appears at the top of the document review page:

The box appears only to the document author, and lets you know that the document is private — only viewable by you, the document author. If you invite someone to review the document, the Private Flag goes away to denote that the document is no longer private (but of course you can uninvite a reviewer at any time to make the document private again).

The easiest way to see how the Private Flag works is to create a document in the browser. You’ll see the Private Flag from the moment you create the document, and it’ll stay active until you invite someone to review that document.

Our hope is that this will give Approver.com users more control and information about their documents, making the site easier to use and understand at the same time.

Use Approver.com with Your iPhone or iPod Touch

We’ve added support for the iPhone and iPod Touch on Approver.com. You can now use your mobile device to check the status of documents as well as view your Approver.com contacts from almost anywhere.

To get started, point your iPhone or iPod touch browser to:

http://i.approver.com/

Sign in with your normal Approver.com user name and password. Feel free to explore and let us know if you have any questions or feedback.