Jeffrey McManus

I haven’t posted any of my usual embittered missives on the blog over the past week because I’ve been coding like a madman, cranking out stuff for my consulting clients as well as working on a major new release of Approver.com.

Yesterday we pushed out the release. The big new feature is Workgroups, which enable you to define a group of people to share documents with. Now when you want to share ten documents with ten people, you only have to perform one action instead of a hundred. Extra super handy! Members of the group can invite other members (if you allow them to) and any member of the group can add documents.

As the group owner, you control who has access to the group and its contents (so if one of your co-workers becomes not-your-coworker, you can remove them from the group and remove their access to your group’s work). So not only do workgroups save time, they make it easier to control who has access to your stuff.

Our pals over at Lifehacker posted a terrific review of the new feature (thanks guys!).

This week I’m purchasing an SSL certificate for Approver.com so we can secure our login page. Man, what a pain this is.

I have been going back and forth with Thawte for over a week now, trying to get a certificate that will do what we want to do. I originally bought their low-end product (what they call the "SSL123" certificate) only to find out that it doesn’t work with our configuration (Windows Server 2003 running IIS 6 with multiple sites using host headers). As soon as their tech support dudes figured out that they’d sold me the wrong kind of certificate, they routed me into a customer service black hole and now they won’t return my emails. I’m crossing Thawte off the list of companies I’ll do business with.

So I’m looking for another certificate vendor. I now know that I need what’s called a wildcard certificate, which is a little more expensive than a regular certificate, but allows you to host as many subdomains as you want using the same certificate. I found these vendors:

This is crazy. There’s a 5X difference between the lowest and highest price for this product? Am I totally missing something here? Has anyone had any experience with these vendors? Would I be dumb to go with the $199 product?

This was an excellent start to the workweek. It was Approver.com’s best product review ever and it came at a crucial time (the summer lull, when all consumer internet properties experience a dip in usership and new signups).

I peeked at Approver.com’s logs a few times today and it looks like the new users who are finding the site as a result of this piece are actually doing stuff — creating documents, inviting friends — which makes it even more gratifying. Concept, consider yourself proven.

We did a fairly large release on Approver.com this week after not pushing any major new features for the last few months. I’ve been too busy with consulting, in fact, even to hand off anything to my most excellent offshore team. But I’ve resolved to show them — as well as Approver users — some more love in the coming months. (At the same time, we also added a new consulting client which I’m excited about — more on that later in the week.)

Anyway, this week over on Approver.com we added importing of contacts from GMail, Yahoo, Plaxo, and more.

We also added document tagging. I was surprised to get a few requests from users for this feature — I figured it’d be a while before people started storing enough documents for something like folders or tagging to make sense, so it’s an excellent sign that people are asking for this kind of feature. It was pretty easy to do, so enjoy.

Finally we’re also doing a user survey this month, so if you’re an Approver.com user, please take the survey and let us know how you’re using (or not using) the site.

Yesterday we added a pretty big new feature to Approver.com: the ability to publish any uploaded file or document you create in the browser to the web. You can read the blog post describing this new feature or try it out yourself.

We pushed a new version of Approver.com this morning — you can now use the site to request a file that another user can upload directly into your document queue. More info here.

We did a big feature announcement this morning (it’s now possible to post to your blog from within Approver.com) and we announced our first partnership (with Typepad).

Details are over on the Approver.com product blog or you can read the press release.

I’m very excited to announce that we released the first set of Web services APIs for Approver.com this week. These APIs give you the ability to retrieve information about document status on Approver.com, including the documents you need to approve and the list of a document’s reviewers. More Web services — including read/write calls that enable you to create documents and invite reviewers programmatically — will be along soon.

If you’re a developer and you want to play with our APIs, there are three steps:

• Sign up for Approver.com if you haven’t already
• Obtain an application key for use by your application
• Review the developer documentation, particularly the authentication guide

Using the Web service APIs is free for noncommercial use. The calls themselves are RESTful (meaning you give us a URL and we give you some XML back) so they should work with any programming language and platform. We have code examples in C# for now but we’re going to see what we can do to add more later.

I should mention that we are working on a paid referral program for Approver in which we’ll pay you if you refer new users to the site who then convert into paid users. This will eventually be an open program, but as with the Web services APIs, we want to make sure we get all the details right, so for now, if you’re interested and you have a web site that generates traffic that you think might be complimentary to the Approver.com experience, drop us a line on the feedback form.

Here’s the review. This piece was a precede for the Office 2.0 conference which starts this evening and goes through Thursday, when I’ll be going completely mental as I participate in a twelve-way competitive cage match lightning demo in front of the entire 500-person conference.

One cool thing that happened as I was talking to Rafe Needleman, the writer, on the phone about Approver: he suggested a feature that we’d already mocked up. I’d put the mockup in Approver as a way to share it with my team, so it was really easy to just add Rafe as an additional approver to let him look at it. (As he mentions in his review, he approved the mockup and left a comment on it.) :)

  Silicon Valley NewTech Meetup by b_d_solis.

Here’s me making an emphatic point about sharing documents online. This was taken by the most excellent Brian Solis at the Silicon Valley NewTech Meetup on Tuesday night.

I will be speaking and giving live demonstrations of Approver.com twice in the next few weeks.

The first demo will be at the Silicon Valley NewTech Meetup in Palo Alto tonight (October 3).

The next will be at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco next week. The conference is October 11-12 but my session will be at 10AM on Thursday the 12th. The session is a competitive series of lightning demos; Approver is going up against a dozen or so other "Office 2.0" tools and applications. At the end the audience will vote for their favorite demo, so if you’re going to the conference and you’re an Approver.com fancier, do please attend and vote for your favorite beige web site.

I’ll also be speaking (although probably not demoing) at the Evans Development Products Conference in San Jose on Friday, October 20. This talk will be less about consumer sites and more about my experience developing, launching and managing platform products for developers, so if you want a taste of what I’ve been doing on the consulting side, here’s your chance.

Update: Just got word that the Evans conference is cancelled, so if you want to see the McManus Approver.com floor show, your only chance will be at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week.

Just released something I’ve been working on for a few weeks: a desktop alerting widget for Approver.com.

More details over on the Approver product blog.

Approver.com has been getting some great reviews and links:

• Matt Marshall reviewed it today in VentureBeat
• Also got a great review by Gina Trapani in Lifehacker
• Om Malik linked to it on the day we launched, which generated an amusing cavalcade of new users
• We’ve also seen some interesting international uptake (specifically from Japan and Italy)

Suw surprised me the other day by asking for some Approver.com schwag. To be honest, I was totally caught off guard. Normally I am all about the schwag, but we’re trying to do this business in a low-fi way (he says, typing this from the neighborhood cafe). But it occurred to me that we could have some fun with the Approver concept, so here goes. Enjoy!

Approver.com Hostility Tee
by
jeffreymcmanus
Get this custom t-shirt at Zazzle

I’ll be at the STIRR Mixer in San Francisco next Wednesday. I attended one of these a few months back and found it to be very valuable and fun. It’s always inspiring to see what other entrepeneurs are up to.

If you’re going to be there too and you want to talk Approver.com or if you want to talk consulting, please do come find me. I am all about the networking these days.

This morning I thought back to the time I launched a commercial, consumer-facing web site back in 2000. It didn’t go smoothly for a number of reasons. Most of the reasons were my fault, but it didn’t help that we had a customer that put us under unbelievable time pressure that we should have pushed back against. We didn’t have time to do adequate QA on the site, particularly when it was under load, so the site worked well when four people were using it, but collapsed utterly when the customer subjected their entire user base to it at once. D’oh.

This actually turned out to be not a huge deal in retrospect because the business was doomed anyway (we were marketing our products and services to a bunch of customers who were destined to mostly go out of business within months). But obviously, this is not how you prefer things to go.

When I posted on the Approver.com product blog last night that I loved launching products, I should have mentioned that I loved doing it as a product manager and business owner, not as a system administrator. As a system administrator, I hate it. Some developers hate dealing with customers, some hate compromising with the suits on what’s going into the 3.1 release. System administration is the thing that I absolutely despise.

I was thinking about this today because I woke up this morning to see that Approver.com was unresponsive after Om Malik linked to it last night. I shut out everything in my brain until I could get to my Mac and log in to the production server to see what was going on.

So I’m sitting on my bed at 7AM this morning in my shorts with my Mac on my lap, remotely poking the production server and muttering things like "hmm, you seem pretty perky to me, why aren’t you serving up data?" while in the back of my mind I’m wondering whether I’m going to be able to get my kid off to kindergarten that day.

When I can’t figure out what’s going on in four seconds or less, I think, oh crap, it’s 2000 all over again. Except…it isn’t 2000 all over again. I have six years of experience under my belt that I didn’t have then (and for an essentially self-taught coder with no computer science degree, that makes a huge difference).

A while back ninja sysadmin Martin Kelly dispensed some pertinent advice: the first task a sysadmin should perform when faced with a crisis is to go outside and have a cigarette. Unfortunately, this morning I had no cigarettes and haven’t ever smoked one, so rather than adding a new learning task to my plate, I had a brief conversation with my four month old assistant sysadmin. He gave me a big smile which made me realize that everything was going to be OK, and then I went down and fixed the problem in like five minutes.

The problem was something related to configuration I’d done a long time
ago, but fortunately due to some other good decisions I made when I first started coding Approver.com
(mostly having to do with basic stuff like logging and code generation
tools), I was able to resolve the error about 10 minutes after I woke
up. (So…problem averted, and if you haven’t tried out Approver yet, now’s the time.)

The indefatigible Om Malik just posted a link to Approver.com from his new Web Worker Daily blog. Thanks Om!

A couple people asked for screenshots or a guided tour thingie for Approver.com, so I burned the late evening oil and cranked one out. Enjoy!

I’m usually all about the sharing, but I have to admit I’ve been a little cagey over the blog in the past month or so. After leaving Yahoo! I mentioned I was starting a consultancy to help businesses capitalize on the knowledge and experience I’ve built up over the years doing platform products and developer relations. And then there was this other thing (which I linked to a few weeks back but didn’t actually talk about here). Today it’s time to talk about the other thing.

How many times have you sent an email attachment to a group of people with the intention of getting feedback on it? When I was working in big Internet companies as well as running my own business, this happened a lot and it drove me crazy every time — to the point where I’d have call a meeting (ugh) or print out a document just to get people to review a 10-slide powerpoint deck or a two-page press release.

The experience of collaborating by sending around email attachments is just execrable:

• You have no way to know if the attachment ever got there
• Lots of corporate email systems don’t let you send attachments, or they limit the size of the file you can send
• People often forget to attach the file in the first place
• If you send the file to a bunch of people, soon your inbox is polluted with dozens of "me too!" responses
• You often don’t know definitively whether the important person who needs to approve the document has actually done so
• It’s really difficult to locate the document along with all of its comments six months in the future
• Sending confidential documents in email is awful from a security perspective

Corporate content management and workflow systems were set up to deal with these problems, but they tend to be:

• Expensive
• Difficult to set up, customize and maintain
• Not easy to extend outside of your domain (so if you want your boss, your attorney and your outside PR firm to review a document, you’re basically out of luck; enjoy your 2-hour conference call)

Approver.com was created to solve this problem. The idea is to provide something that’s more or less as easy to use as email attachments and let people publish documents online instead of mailing them around. Importantly, you don’t have to change the editor you work with if you don’t want (Approver.com works with uploaded files as well as documents you create in the browser).

Only the people you invite to review a document can view it (one early tester described Approver as "Evite for documents" which I think really nails it). You can see clearly when a reviewer has viewed a document, you get an email alert when they’ve approved or posted a comment on a document, and everyone you’ve invited to work on a document is added to your network of contacts to make it easier to invite those folks the next time you have a document you want to circulate for review.

Approver.com is free to try. If all you ever do is approve documents, that’s free too (so you don’t have to worry about us dinging your boss just because you want to use Approver to send him documents). There’s a paid account for heavy hitters who want to create lots of documents, but it’s pretty cheap compared to other services like this, and you don’t have to pay unless you want to create a bunch of documents.

You can try out Approver.com now by registering here (it’s free!). After you’ve registered, I’ll send you a document to approve so you get the full effect. Once you’ve gotten the hang of it, feel free to invite friends and co-workers to review documents — the site is open for business, so go for it and if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave feedback. (Comments here are just fine too.)