For more than five years, ShareMethods has been pioneering easy to use and cost effective document management via the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model and its cloud based computing platform.
Our first release in 2004 was a standalone service for on-demand document sharing and collaboration, enabling easy, secure, and fast access to documents in the cloud. This solution focused on powering sales and marketing teams with their extended network of business partners, enabling vibrant communities with document rich portals. In 2005, ShareMethods was one of the first ever applications to launch in the AppExchange, via our ShareNow service, providing a unique integrated solution with salesforce.com, enabling access for sales, marketing, and support documents associated with key Accounts and Opportunities.
In 2007, we launched ShareOffice, extending capabilities into the world of document creation on-demand, where documents could be created dynamically in the browser integrating data from salesforce.com into customer centric sales proposals, contracts, quotes, NDAs, and invoices; that same year ShareMethods launched ShareDrive, enabling desktop integration for drag and drop, batch upload and download, and in-place editing with desktop documents.
In 2008, ShareMethods integrated with EchoSign, the leading document signing service – enabling any document in ShareMethods to be electronically signed or to be processed for automation of written signatures. Also in 2008, ShareMethods launched its Oracle CRM OnDemand offering, integrating its on-demand document offering with Oracle’s SaaS based CRM, further powered by EchoSign integration. And in 2009, ShareMethods delivered on the promise of flexible private sharing workspaces via ShareSpaces with configurable documents, taxonomies, invited users, and more.
Consider all of the enhancements to the baseline ShareMethods SaaS service since the initial launch. End-users can now access their documents in the cloud – from its standalone service and portal, integrated with salesforce.com and Oracle, via document signing workflows with EchoSign, and through interaction on the desktop with documents created by Microsoft and Adobe – as well as in the browser. In summary, flexible, easy, and secure access to documents across a range of platforms allows ShareMethods to claim industry leadership for the Document Cloud.
And ShareMethods recently had nice industry recognition from InformationWeek, one of the leading IT media sources in the world, with an article and in-depth video review of our service, posted to their home page and now in their archives. The article and video review quickly sum up the advantages of the ShareMethods document cloud platform in the piece titled: “ReviewCam: Sharemethods Cloud-based Document Management“. Check it out at:
http://bit.ly/InformationWeek-ShareMethods-Review
Selected highlights from the article are below:
“Document management. Boring, but necessary, right? Just to spice it up, put it in the cloud on Salesforce.com’s App Exchange platform or Oracle’s OnDemand Suite, and what you get is document management that starts to mean something from a customer-centric point of view. What you’ve got is Sharemethods.”
“The ability to link your document management system into something like Salesforce or Oracle CRM is also quite powerful.”
“Easily drag and drop virtually any document you already have, [along with] workflow for electronic signatures and approvals”
“[ShareMethods] also takes on a decidedly Web 2.0 flavor with community ratings and reviews. I like that you can store URLs as documents (sites or web files, which are also tag-able in the system), and conversely create public-facing URLs out of any existing document (which you might put on a web site or a blog or in a newsletter).”
ShareMethods is excited about its achievements to date and is looking forward to exciting new developments for the Document Cloud in 2010. Stay tuned and join us for the ride…
Posted by Eric Hoffert 
