salesforce.com has designated ShareMethods’ on-demand service ShareNow as an AppExchange Essential. This honor is reserved for a select set of AppExchange applications. salesforce.com explains their AppExchange Essentials as follows:

 “[AppExchange Essentials are] here to help users of different departments, verticals, and segments quickly locate apps hand-picked to meet their specific business needs and objectives.

Salesforce.com’s in-house experts have made these app recommendations based on five criteria: user ratings, feedback from customer interviews, pre-integration on the Salesforce platform, simple and intuitive user interface, and ability to address top business needs for the particular department, vertical, segment, or use case.”

salesforce.com selected ShareNow as an AppExchange Essential and our new app ShareOffice is built on the foundation of ShareNow (so its even better…). Click on the image below to learn more about ShareNow.

ShareMethods is excited and proud to have salesforce.com recognize its documents on-demand solution as one of the top applications in the AppExchange. The designation as an AppExchange essential follows previous endorsements by salesforce.com including their lead Customer Success guru Wendy Close, previously Gartner Group analyst in her post “Cool Tools Heat Up the AppExchange”. And App of the Week for ShareOffice too…

Thank You salesforce.com!

Plus, we should also let you know that InsideCRM noted ShareNow as one of the Top 20 apps in the salesforce.com AppExchange. Click on the image below for the article.

One of the most common and important business processes in the world is the signing of contracts. Companies spend alot of time coming up with great ideas; selling, marketing, and building those great ideas into products and services; and as a crucial last step, customers need to sign contracts. But getting a contract signed is far from easy - the process is often time consuming, cumbersome, complex, and error prone.

But now, there is a better way. And the better way is not just for contracts, it can be used for documents important to any sales process including proposals, quotes, invoices, customer letters, and more. We call it “Create-Send-Sign” and indeed its as easy as 1-2-3.

The idea is to have a simple online wizard which guides a user through the process of creating, sending, and signing a document, where the process is as follows:

• Create: Documents can be based on common templates such as contracts, proposals, etc. A user selects a template and customer data is automatically inserted to create an online document. A user can edit the document if needed or go straight to final output. Once the document is ready, it is saved as a PDF, and it can be previewed to check for accuracy and quality.
• Send: Once the document has been created, edited (if needed), previewed, and saved, it can be emailed to a prospect or customer. The email along with a link to the document is saved into an activity history so there is an audit trail for sending the document. Emailing a document would be appropriate for a sales proposal or an invoice as examples.
• Sign: If a signature is needed, a user can send a document for electronic signing or written signature. In the case of e-signing, the recipient and sender complete the e-signing process completely via email. For written signatures, the document is sent to a recipient who signs it and returns the document via a 1-800 fax number. The 1-800 fax number ensures the document is scanned and digitized with final signed copies emailed to all parties. At any time, it is possible to check the document signing status

A screen shot is available by clicking on the thumbnail below, which illustrates the Create-Send-Sign wizard with an online editor showing the online document.

From a business perspective, the Create-Send-Sign feature can be hugely valuable to any user that needs to quickly and easily create documents online for sending or signing. Time can be reduced in a sales process to complete a contract signing, revenues can be delivered more quickly, staff time can be reduced by having a quick way to generate these documents, and accuracy is increased through standardization of templates and automatic inclusion of customer data. Its a big, big win for everyone involved. If this sounds good to you, install ShareOffice right now from the salesforce.com AppExchange.

From a technical perspective, there is alot of complexity under the hood. This solution integrates ShareMethods, salesforce.com, EchoSign, and iNetWord into a seamless user experience and a special thanks to all of our partners who supported us in making this happen. The solution leverages the power of OpenSAM, an open standard for online app integration, as well as the Force.com and EchoSign web services APIs. Its a great example of the power of web architecture to make life simple and easy for a user, delivering many benefits, on-demand. We are very excited about the importance of this new capability and delivering it into the marketplace. We invite you to check it out and roll it out across your organization so that Create-Send-Sign can be as easy as 1-2-3.

This week, ShareMethods rolled out a set of long awaited and frequently requested features for team and partner portals. Many of our customers and prospects have asked us for the ability to send branded email notifications to their internal teams, business partners, prospects, and customers. Likewise we have been asked to add an ability for branded login pages and branded domain names too. Well, after a bunch of hard work, these features have arrived and we are excited about it. ShareMethods customers can now configure a branded email notification by uploading images for header and footer areas of a branded HTML email message. Images can be uploaded as PNG, GIF, or JPEG. Users can also modify the text that goes out to new users so that it is company or brand specific. A screen shot of the branded email configuration page is shown below:

Once a new graphic has been added for the header and footer of the email notification, all users who receive an email notification will see the branded emails. A simple example is below where an “Acme Company” logo is at the top of the message and a “Big Brand, Inc.” logo is at the bottom, with email text and document links in the center.  As of this release, the email notifications are supported in MS Outlook, Lotus Notes, Google’s Gmail, and Yahoo! mail; this covers many hundreds of millions of email users and we will be working to add support for additional desktop and web mail clients in the coming months.

In addition to the branded email configuration and end-user feature, ShareMethods has added the ability for a customer to have a branded domain name (i.e., www.sharemethods.net/acmecompany) and a branded login page. You can check out the branded login page and we also have a screen shot shown below:

And so, with branded emails, branded login pages, and branded domain names, its a whole new capability for deploying team and partner portals with ShareMethods. We are putting you more and more in the driver’s seat to deliver your content and documents to your internal staff, partners, prospects, and customers with your company’s brand front and center. We hope you like these new features - be sure to let us know your feedback and how we can make these features even better.

ZDNet posted a great article called “Standards Support for Mashups Emerge” (by Dion Hinchliffe). The article takes a look at the landscape of standards for mashups including OpenSocial, OpenSAM, OpenFriend, S-Mash, OpenAjax, OpenID, DataPortability.org, etc. remarking about the value of such standards to interconnect online applications. He also focuses in on OpenSAM as one of the best standards to emerge for mashups as follows:

• But the most comprehensive and detailed plan for bringing standard approaches and techniques to mashups has to be OpenSAM, which leverages many existing standards such as WebDAV, openid, LDAP, and also subscribes to DataPortability.org’s standards to create a consistent and well-organized design and interaction model for offering complex, heterogeneous mashups to both the consumer and business community. Even more importantly, they cite a good number of companies already offering Web applications that support OpenSAM. The OpenSAM vision is broad and focused across the usage spectrum and the OpenSAM folks say that “once OpenSAM is added to an application, it can immediately join mashups with all other OpenSAM applications.”

and also:

• OpenSAM. A comprehensive and sophisticated set of standards and documented practices for creating mashups. OpenSAM is very advanced in that it support a wide range mashup capabilities including discovery, provisioning, branding, identity, workflow, document storage, meta-data and more. OpenSAM lists a number of existing products that implement it today and it also provides many of the look and feel standards that many users will find helpful as they encounter more and more applications built on a mashup approach.

We are honored to see this type of recognition for OpenSAM and it is a validation for all of the hard work from the participants.  We look forward to expanding upon the groundwork and taking OpenSAM to new levels of utility for the industry.

The OpenSAM consortium of which ShareMethods is a co-founder has also launched a community forum in Google Groups. Check it out at http://groups.google.com/group/opensam. If you are a member or prospective member of OpenSAM, please join the OpenSAM group. Listen to our ideas, share your suggestions, and help to make OpenSAM as powerul as possible. Currently, in a project with OpenSAM members, we are exploring ways in which to have a slimmed down version of OpenSAM to make it very easy to connect apps in just a few hours, a starting point from which applications can expand to richer functionality as home and productivity apps. We are also exploring the possibility of adding multimedia apps to the existing categories of home and productivity apps and looking at linkages with existing data standard initiatives such as DataPortability.org. In eveny event, please check out the OpenSAM community and if you like it, please sign up and participate.

Another great Office 2.0 conference in 2007. The event itself was bigger and better this year with more Office 2.0 apps, more customers, more case studies, etc. Likewise there was more great progress for ShareOffice and OpenSAM.

A number of key announcements were made at Office 2.0 2007 including (1) new OpenSAM partners (Persony, Jotlet, Huddle, Data Infosys) (2) an expansion of ShareOffice functionality to include online calendars and online meetings, and (3) initial features for ShareMethods on the Apple iPhone including on-demand document search, browse, and viewing of content including text, images, documents, spreadsheets, and more - a great way for mobile salespeople to access thousands of documents easily and quickly when they are in the field with a need to get key documents.

The Office 2.0 Announcements were covered in media and blogs including ReadWriteWeb, ZDNet, and WebWare (CNET).

The progress on OpenSAM is accelerating - the standard itself is moving forward rapidly with lots of new additions including open source code for Single Sign-On (SSO); document file browsing (file open, edit, save, etc.); an RDF/xHTML/XML approach for Application Description Files (ADF); a “Build Application Launch Link” test platform; and new graphics/logos for web sites, banners, buttons, badges, etc. The OpenSAM community web site is evolving nicely with enhanced docs, more partners (up to 15 now…), richer specs, etc. Most significantly, the time it now takes an OpenSAM partner to get up and running to connect via Single Sign-On (SSO) is just a few hours so ease of integration has made dramatic progress. This is all moving us towards the ubiquitous Office 2.0 / web application “dial tone”…

Please be sure to check out the latest and greatest at www.opensam.org. Lots of potential partners have expressed interest to join forces, stay tuned for announcements in this area. We rolled out the key principles for OpenSAM -”Connects to All” intended to focus on enabling widespread web application “dial tone” across Office 2.0 applications and the component level messages (1) Connect Apps to Apps; (2) Connect Apps to Content; and (3) Connect People to Apps. At the end of the day, its all driving towards the Connection of People to People, in a socially networked business and digital media environment…

At the conference itself, OpenSAM was featured prominently including a special panel session with partners including EditGrid, iNetWord, Persony, Jotlet, and Huddle; inclusion in a panel called “New Platforms” with salesforce.com, WebEx/Cisco, Zoho, and Rearden Commerce, and a dedicated pavilion of 10 companies showing OpenSAM solutions (or working on it). Check out the Preezo presentation from the OpenSAM Panel - it reviews the Why, Who, What, and Differentiation principles of OpenSAM. (by the way, Preezo is working great now - I used it for all of my presentations at the conference and it worked like a charm every time [great work Preezo team...]). The most significant way to consider OpenSAM is its goal to connect any app to any other app. Its the P2P (peer-to-peer) Web Platform API based on a mesh model rather than the more traditional hub and spoke model (i.e., all apps connect into one vendor API). These models can and should co-exist to really broaden the appeal of any Office 2.0 services.

There was lots of interest in ShareOffice and OpenSAM at the show from small and large companies alike including many of the biggest ecosystem platform providers. It will be interesting to see how OpenSAM evolves over the rest of the year given its recent acceleration and momentum. We have customer, product, and team announcements queued up for Dreamforce 2007 where we are a sponsor too - please be sure to visit us there and more soon on that topic too.

The last seven days have been filled with major milestones and announcements. For starters, ShareOffice for AppExchange soft-launched into the salesforce.com AppExchange on Friday May 4.  The soft-launch also included an entirely new category in the AppExchange called “Online Office Apps”.

ShareOffice is the world’s first online office based on open Internet standards. In addition to this new approach, ShareOffice has many features that are new for the online office apps space (i.e., “one click” documents, enterprise class document management, rich CRM integration, offline support, desktop integration, etc.).

This launch has been a major effort in stealth mode for the last year with lots of hard work from partners iNetOffice, EditGrid, Preezo, support from salesforce.com, end-users working in beta test mode, and our team too.

On Monday May 7, salesforce.com called ShareOffice the “App of the Week”:

“We always preach the end of proprietary software only to make the quiet and resigned realization that the On-Demand revolution deck we just presented was prepared on Microsoft PowerPoint. We preach software as a service but use Excel to manage our data and spreadsheets. We preach document collaboration via the web but this is usually limited to emailing Word attachments back and forth. Until now…

If Microsoft Office is the perennial Goliath of desktop software, then ShareOffice would be the David of the Business Web. ShareOffice provides an online application for easy and quick creation, management, and  sharing of online documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The pre-built templates make creating proposals, quotes, contracts, coversheets, etc. a breeze. Additionally, all the applications integrate with standard Microsoft programs, PDF, OpenOffice, etc. And most importantly, online collaboration becomes so much easier since this management system is on-demand and available wherever you or your customers or employees have internet access. This application ties three great on-demand solutions together in one package for easy use and implementation.”

Following this writeup, ReadWrite Web did a post “ShareOffice Launches Open Standards Based Web Office Suite” and StartupSquad as well. On Tuesday May 8, ShareOffice and the open standards upon which it was based - OpenSAM - were announced in press releases.

The Red Herring did a cover story for RedHerring.com titled “SaaS Consortium Sets Standards” on the same day as the announcement with a highlight below:

“Analysts praised OpenSAM’s approach. “I was impressed with them on two levels,” said Jeffrey Kaplan, managing director of the research firm THINKstrategies. “No. 1, the basic functionality—it does offer a viable alternative to Microsoft. No. 2, they recognize that a lot of companies aren’t willing to give up all their [software]… they offer complements that integrate well” into an enterprise’s existing system.”

Plus the new OpenSAM community site was launched at www.opensam.org complete with lots of technical documents on how to build interoperable apps (and even a fun new animated logo showing a dynamic mash-up). And ten companies in total have lined up to participate in OpenSAM at launch.

The ShareOffice announcement even made it into Twitter… http://twitter.com/QeeGi/statuses/54650022

ShareOffice is one of the first enterprise mash-ups for sale - indeed it is a federated application comprised of best-of-breed on-demand services. It has been a great and exciting collaboration with the founding partners of OpenSAM and ShareOffice and likewise it has been great working with early users of the service. ShareOffice and OpenSAM are off to a good start and we look forward to next steps to realize all of the power and potential with both of these developments.

Last week, I participated in the Red Herring Spring 2007 conference in Monterey, California. It was a great event covering a diversity of topics of interest including alternative energy, digital media, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).  I spoke at a keynote roundtable session moderated by Scott Martin, Senior Editor at the Red Herring, with CEOs from BlueLithim and Wikia and two venture capitalists. Topics covered included Office 2.0, the evolution of online video advertising, and what’s next for user generated content.  Conversations were pretty interesting and touched also on Web 3.0, evolution of Enterprise search and workflow, etc. I also had a chance to catch up with digital media colleagues from my past life at Apple Computer (Ty Roberts, now CTO at Gracenote and Casey King CTO of LifeSize Communications) and had a reminder of just how nice it is in Monterey Bay…

In addition to the panel, ShareMethods made a key product announcement for ShareDrive OnDemand which was covered by InternetNews.com. ShareDrive OnDemand solves some pretty key issues with on-demand document services, which typically are not integrated with a user’s desktop experience and can become inaccessible during major internet outages. ShareDrive OnDemand addresses these limitations via support for desktop integration (i.e., drag and drop of documents, batch upload, batch download), offline synchronization (download latest documents before jumping on a plane, and then automatically synchronizing any changed documents back to the online service while downloading updates too), and local backup to a server or laptop for documents “in the cloud”.

One of our customers - LiteScape Technologies - who also announced their use of our solution for a global deployment to hundreds of users to support document sharing and communications with their partners such as AT&T, Microsoft, WebEx, Cisco, and IBM, among others - is a user of ShareDrive OnDemand and is using the solution to ensure a local and scheduled backup of all of their online documents. We also announced a global deployment of 450 users at Airspan Networks and our deployment for a non-profit organization (Pacific Swimming) via our ShareAction program.

ShareDrive is a subscription service ($5 per user per month) when a customer downloads a small applet to provide offline support and rich desktop integration. Its free when it is used in conjunction with the operating system and that is called ShareDrive Lite. This magic can all happen easily because the foundation of ShareDrive OnDemand is based on one of the open Internet standards that comprise OpenSAM (see next blog post…)  - webDAV. Let us know if you are interested in ShareDrive OnDemand and we will get you setup pronto…

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.

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.

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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