While looking for a better way to securely send design proofs to some of my clients I came across a free site called DocumentReady.com. This service absolutely blew my mind! Trust me guys, this is seriously worth checking out. What does it do you ask? What can you use it for? Well here are my thoughts on that:
Basically the DocumentReady service works by allowing you to upload and categorize documents while assigning those documents to groups of one or more people. And its all done over SSL so unlike emailing attachments there doesn't need to be any concern over security. (Yes, emailing is not secure on most systems... I bet you did not know that did you?).
Don't get me wrong, Document Sharing by itself is pretty uninteresting stuff folks. But this system has some nifty features I never realized I needed until I saw them in place. For one it lets your users provided feedback on each of the documents you upload... this is great for me because if my client wants a change to the proof they simply "add a comment" to the document, I'm notified of it and can make the changes they want. But wait, it gets even better because it also has a version history; so when I upload a new document the old document is kept in a "revision bin" so that it can be reviewed at any given time. I also have a log of when a document was downloaded by a specific user so no more having to listen to "We never got the proof you promised us.... (boo hoo hoo)".
It's also worth pointing out there are differnet types of users you can create. For example you can create a user that is an "administrator" who can have full functionality, or you can create a public user that can download documents from the group, and you can create a public user that can only access documents assigned directly to them. This is seriously rad stuff... once you wrap your head around it.
For kicks, I tested out another one of their features called OCR-Indexing. Basically what this does is convert a scanned document into text, then into a pdf, and then indexes that into the built in search engine that it has. Now, I will admit I have absolutely no need for this, but it is pretty darn cool... and I'm sure someone out there could make use of this. Oh, and by the way, you can also fax PDFs, Word Documents, and Excel Spreadsheets directly from the program. I faxed an Excel Spreadsheet and it came out awesome... I have to admit I was a bit surprised! :)
Anyway, there is a free account you can use after the evaluation but I went with the basic plan because I upload client files almost daily. For what it does its pretty inexpensive in my book and most people can probably get away with just using the free plan.
Has anyone else tried this? How are you using it in your business/organization?
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