Since adding support for the new Microsoft Office 2007 document formats on Approver.com, lots of our users have begun sharing Office 2007 documents. But some of us aren’t quite ready to upgrade yet. So what happens if some of your users are using Office 2007 while some are sticking with Office 2003 for now?

Microsoft has you covered with a tool called the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack. It’s intended for Office 2003 users who need to view and save files in the new Office 2007 format. So if anybody sends you a document with a file extension like .xlsx or .docx, the Compatibility Pack is what you need. Download it here.

Our users are always asking for more information about the life cycle of their documents, and we’re happy to give it to them. We’ve always provided a reviewer status box on the document page and email alerts to let you know when interesting things happen to your documents. But it’s never been easy to get a clear summary of what’s going on with all your documents and reviewers on a single page.

This week we introduce a new way to keep track of what’s going on with your documents. My Feed shows you all the events that you and your collaborators have taken on your documents on Approver.com in the last 60 days. The items that appear in your feed are even more detailed and granular than the information you receive in email alerts, and your feed is also available in RSS format so you can follow it in a feed reader such as Google Reader or My Yahoo.

My Feed is accessible at the top of every page when you’re logged in to Approver.com. This is a free upgrade for all Approver.com users.

This week we added a new feature to Approver.com: Sticky Documents. This gives you the ability to highlight a document with a single click and make that document stay at the top of your My Documents list. It’s a handy way to make those documents you’re working on at the moment easily accessible.

To make a document sticky, simply click on the document’s Make Sticky link in your My Documents list. To unstick the document, click on the Unstick link. Simple, sanitary and fun.

Today we made a little change to our upload page to enable sharing of Microsoft Works files with the .WKS extension.

This change came about as a result of a user request. If you have a file type that you’d like to share on Approver.com, please leave us feedback.

Today we released a fix to our upload page that resolves an issue that was preventing some Approver.com Pro users from taking advantage of our new 50 megabyte maximum for file uploads. If you have a Pro account, you should be able to upload files of up to 50 megabytes in size; if you don’t have a Pro account, upgrade here.

We just released a new version of the Approver.com upload page that fixes a problem having to do with the way we store old versions of uploaded files. If you were one of the two or three users who were having trouble accessing revisions of uploaded files this week, this should fix things.

Today we also added support for uploading and sharing Scrivener files. Scrivener is a terrific tool for writers; it has an integrated outliner, a place for research notes and external links, and awesome project management features. It’s particularly good for working on book-length projects. For more information, check out their web site or read the NY Times’ glowing review of Scrivener that came out last week.

Today we’ve made some significant enhancements to the way you can upload files to Approver.com. Paid Approver.com Pro users can now upload and share files as large as 50 megabytes.

In addition to increasing the maximum upload size, we’ve added a few new file types that you can share on Approver.com. These include media files (digital video as well as MP3s) as well as compressed .ZIP archives. As with the more generous upload limit, these new file types are available to paid Approver.com Pro users only. Upgrade now to take advantage of these handy new features.

Last but not least, we’ve re-engineered our upload page to make the process of uploading a file much friendlier, particularly for large files. You can now see a progress bar in the browser that shows you how much time your upload will take, and the page will validate your upload before the upload is sent (so you won’t waste time uploading a file that’s too large for us to accept, for example).

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

One of the strengths of Approver.com is the fact that we let you work the way you want to. If you want to use our in-browser word processor to create and share documents online, you can do that. But if you want to share files created in the applications you’re accustomed to, such as Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, PhotoShop, or Framemaker, we’ve got you covered there, too.

Today we added support for the new file formats provided by Microsoft Office 2007. You can use Approver.com to upload and share documents created in Word 2007 (.docx), Powerpoint 2007 (.pptx) and Excel 2007 (.xlsx). To get started sharing uploaded files on Approver.com, visit our upload page, which contains a list of the two dozen uploadable file types we now support.

For some time now, Approver.com has given you the ability to associate more than one email address with your account. It’s handy, particularly if you answer to more than one email address (or if you’re changing jobs and need to change email addresses). The idea is to enable your colleagues to invite you to review a document no matter which email address they know you by.

You can associate a secondary email account with your Approver.com account by going to your Approver.com profile, entering the new email address, and verifying the address by clicking on a link in an email that we’ll send to your new address.

Approver.com Pro users can have up to 10 email addresses associated with their accounts. Today we relaxed the restriction on how many email addresses a free user can have. Users with a free Approver.com account can now have two email addresses associated with their account instead of just one. Also, today we fixed a bug with verification of secondary email addresses (we were sending the verification email to your old email address instead of your new one).

If you’ve been having trouble getting your email address(es) assigned to your Approver.com account properly, this should help. If not, as always, please leave us feedback.

Today the site celebrates its first birthday. In the past 365 days since the launch of Approver.com, we’ve signed up thousands of active users who have created and uploaded thousands of documents. We’ve engaged in countless valuable discussions with users about our feature set and future product roadmap, and we’ve picked up paid users in five countries (thank you!).

Thanks too to our network of friends and advisors who have shown such generosity and given us invaluable encouragement over the past year.

In the past year the site has evolved from a place to simply upload and share Microsoft Office documents into a more fully-featured workgroup application that teams all over the world are using every day to work smarter and communicate more effectively.

But we’re not done yet. In the coming months we’ll continue to roll out upgrades to Approver.com to make the site easier to use and more powerful. The list of things we want to do is long (more than 150 projects at last count), but the higher-priority features we’re planning include:

• The ability for users to administer the accounts of other users
• Support for more granular and intelligent alerting
• Better support for uploading and sharing video
• A better experience for uploading files, and the ability to upload and share larger files
• Better community and social networking features, including the ability to have richer discussions and shared discussions within workgroups
• Support for new document types (such as the calendar document template we released a few weeks ago)
• Integration with other services you use such as Plaxo and Facebook
• Improvements to our web service API to make the site more accessible to developers

Got an idea for what you’d like to see in Year 2 of Approver.com? Let us know.

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.

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.

We just released an updated version of Approver.com. New in today’s release is the ability to engage in chat sessions with document reviewers right on the document review page.

Approver.com uses an in-browser instant messaging tool called Meebo to provide chat functionality. To add chat to your document review page, use the Meebo Me site to create a chat widget, then copy and paste the widget code into your Approver.com profile.

Read more about this new feature in the Approver.com Help Center.

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.

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.