ShareAction – Making the World a Better Place On-Demand

In this blog posting, I’d like to review ShareMethods’ initial efforts to make the world a better place… this is a starting point above and beyond the ongoing development of our on-demand document management and collaboration services and our work to support satisfied customers. We have a program called ShareAction. ShareAction strives to make contributions to the broader community and environment in which the company operates. The idea behind ShareAction is to promote a culture of concern and action for the broader community that is directly integrated into the fabric of the company. The first phase of ShareAction is to (1) define key areas of focus for making contributions and (2) to provide free ShareMethods service for qualifying non-profits in these specific areas. Additional phases of ShareAction  will be introduced over time. ShareAction has the following focus areas:

It is with great pride that I introduce the first member of the ShareAction program – Pacific Swimming. Pacific Swimming is a local committee of USA Swimming, the national governing body for the sport of competitive swimming. Pacific Swimming is a nonprofit representing more than 17,000 athletes and supported by hundreds of volunteers located in Northern California and Nevada. Pacific Swimming funds swimming programs and community pools in areas of need. One of the programs proudly funded by Pacific Swimming is the Oakland Community Pools Project. Swimming skills are considered not only fitness skills by Pacific Swimming, but also life saving skills, both of which are vitally important to children across the country. Pacific Swimming also seeks to develop swimming skills for minorities and underprivileged children, where there is an especially significant need to develop swimming and life saving skills.

                                                                                        

Pacific Swimming has used ShareMethods through the ShareAction program for a variety of key initiatives including development of a swim guide, and support of an important outreach program.Don Power, General Chairman of Pacific Swimming states, “We’ve been very busy for the past six months figuring out the best ways to use our new salesforce license as well as our new ShareMethods license. To encourage our volunteer workforce to familiarize themselves with Share Methods, we used it for our most recent project—our annual swim guide. This guide compiles information and documents, maintained by a variety of volunteers, for all of our club and individual members. ShareMethods enabled everyone with a stake in any section of the guide to review, log comments, and approve those sections before publication. The service was incredibly useful and popular”.

Don also added: “Because of our success using ShareMethods to manage our annual guide, we are just now implementing the service for our outreach program. With ShareMethods, Pacific Swimming has been better able to coordinate efforts of its outreach committee, a committee spread throughout Northern California. It helps us to manage forms, including requests for funding that are received, as well as to track the documented progress of the programs that they support. ShareMethods’ Internet document management services are integral to our ability to manage the expansion of our outreach efforts. We are very grateful to salesforce.com and to ShareMethods for their generous license donations. The fact that the two applications work so well together makes our lives much easier.”

We’d like to encourage the support of Pacific Swimming and their work to make the world a better place. Hopefully through our support we can help them achieve their goals more quickly, easily, and of course more cost-effectively. We would also like to invite other qualifying non-profits to contact us regarding participation in ShareAction.

ShareMethods and EchoSign Integration via Simple Ajax Mashup

At the Office 2.0 Conference in October, I had the pleasure of meeting EchoSign CEO Jason Lemkin. Jason participated in a panel which I led at the conference titled “Collaborative Document Management” (the panel also included the team leader for Google Docs and Spreadsheets among others).

  EchoSign is a prototypical Office 2.0 service; it is focused on streamlining the workflow of signing contracts. The service is fast and easy to use while tackling an important business problem most people have to address on a daily basis – getting signatures needed for sales contracts quickly and easily, etc. As we all know, this process is often slow, error-prone, and riddled with struggles of lost paperwork, etc. EchoSign won “Best of Show” at the Office 2.0 Conference for this innovation, a significant honor for this industry event.

After the conference we decided to sign up for EchoSign. At ShareMethods, we have our own business need to streamline the process of contract signing especially as we have been acquiring more new customers. And so, we tested EchoSign and found it worked well for contract signing. Indeed, after Dreamforce 2006, we had our shortest sales cycle ever – we signed up a new customer in just three business days.  A demo for the prospect on a Thursday was followed by a signed contract on a Monday – and we used EchoSign to streamline the contract signing process for this dramatically fast sales cycle. EchoSign worked great and we have used EchoSign for both written and electronic signatures.

Given our positive experience with EchoSign, we started to explore how we might extend this functionality to our prospects and customers most of whom are working with sales contracts on a regular basis. And so we turned to our new developments with webDAV and Simple Ajax Mashup (see previous posts on this blog). Using these two technologies we were able to browse and select contract and agreement documents from ShareMethods via the EchoSign application.  A screen shot is linked to the thumbnail below which shows ShareMethods on-demand documents accessible to EchoSign.

 

These documents could then move through the EchoSign document signing automation process. Once the document(s) are signed by all parties, a PDF of the counter-signed contract is available. We were then able to save the contract from EchoSign back into ShareMethods. This easy integration is one example of the power of Office 2.0 services working together to streamline common user workflows – in this case further extending the value proposition of each service, dellivering value that is greater than the sum of its parts. This type of interoperability across Office 2.0 services will become increasingly important in 2007 and beyond. We are excited to be able to pioneer this work with the EchoSign service. A screen shot is linked to the thumbnail below which shows the countersigned PDF document generated by EchoSign being saved into ShareMethods on-demand document repository. This is really powerful. Also, this is just the beginning…

Note: ShareMethods now supports webDAV in its production service. A mini desktop app that enables desktop integration for drag and drop, offline sync, and integration with services like EchoSign as described above is available now on a limited basis to ShareMethods prospects and customers upon request. This app will be made more broadly available n Q1 2007.

ShareMethods Covered in Inc. Magazine, Computerworld (again), and salesforce.com Successforce Blog

The last thirty days have been exciting on the media coverage front. To start off, ShareMethods had its second cover story in Computerworld in less than 30 days. The first Computerworld cover story article was published during the Office 2.0 conference, detailing the announcement of Simple Ajax Mashup and the set of Office 2.0 service providers who endorsed the effort. The second Computerworld article focused on stories of success for ShareMethods’ customers.

 The Computerworld article on ShareMethods’ customer success was titled “Tired of Failed Intranets, Users Try ShareNow App“.  This article talked about the challenges faced by our customers when using corporate Intranets to share information with their field sales teams and outside business partners. Access was slow, adoption was limited, and information was out of date. In short periods of time, both customers were able to deploy ShareNow to large numbers of users with significant results – all of a sudden everyone across a customer team on a national and global basis could access the content that they needed on-demand. The customers described ShareNow as easy to use and quick to deploy. ShareMethods customers NMS Communications and Evolution Benefits described their case studies for the “before/after” scenario working with ShareNow. Lots of companies have challenges with their Intranets with regards to user adoption and access. ShareNow makes it easy and fast to set up a powerful on-demand sales and marketing library and it was great to have our customers tell this story.

Salesforce.com’s Customer Success Guru – Wendy Close, formerly the lead analyst at Gartner Group for CRM, posted a new blog entry – “Cool Tools Heat Up the AppExchange“. Her blog post highlighted the AppExchange services that she perceives as category leaders, noting on-demand applications that are Innovative, High Impact, Intriguing, or a mixture of all traits.

She selected ShareMethods as the only on-demand application in the Document Management Category in the AppExchange even though there are dozens of applications for users to choose from…this was an exciting endorsement and we are honored to be highlighted by salesforce.com in this way. Hopefully the stories of success by our customers such as NMS Communications and Evolution Benefits such as the piece in Computerworld will validate this recognition from the on-demand CRM leader.

To top it off, Inc. Magazine did an article highlighting the top software tools to help boost sales revenues and pump up profits. They talked about the next generation of companies pioneering the on-demand application space with a focus on sales productivity and effectiveness, following on the leadership of players such as salesforce.com and NetSuite. Inc. selected only 24 applications from among hundreds to choose from. Once again, ShareMethods was highlighted as a category leader. The top tools selected are also listed on the Inc.com web site – see http://www.inc.com/articles/2006/12/sales.html

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ShareMethods Rolls Out webDAV Support, First Phase of Simple Ajax Mashup

ShareMethods rolled out support for webDAV, the worldwide standard for document authoring and versioning. webDAV is an open Internet standard for sharing documents across multiple applications and platforms (www.webdav.org) and it has been implemented and/or endorsed by Apple, Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and many others. webDAV provides a dramatic new set of capabilities for ShareMethods including desktop integration (i.e., the ability to drag and drop files to/from the desktop to the on-demand document repository) and the first phase of support for Simple Ajax Mashup. ShareMethods is applying a time tested standard in dramatic new ways – supporting the abiity to more easily link together Office 2.0 document productivity applications while empowering users/customers immediately with the capability to work naturally with on-demand documents at the desktop level (on a Mac and PC too…). Much more will be said about the implications for this major new development, which transforms ShareMethods from an application into a platform and marks the beginning of the development of the online office ecosystem promised by the Simple Ajax Mashup specification. Stay tuned for more updates on these key topics.