As I have mentioned before in other posts, I love how the web has given us the opportunity to be able to work with people with no boundaries. Gone are the days of having to work in the same office with someone to get work done. With a variety of web apps that are out there for businesses, there is no reason why you cannot challenge the physical boundaries of having to work in the same space.
One of the tasks in just about any business is the approval of documents and getting feedback as well. For the longest time, if you were not working in the same space as someone else, you would usually email your document to them to get approval or feedback for it. They would then have to download it, open it, and then read it. After that they could make their comments on the document, but then they would have to email it back to you again. At the time, we thought that this solution was the easiest possible.
But, as the web has evolved, so has this process with the introduction of apps like ApproveForMe. It takes the pain of having to email documents to people to get their approval and feedback. I have been testing it out and it has come in very handy for me.
Getting Documents Ready For Approval
When you are ready to send a document to your coworkers for approval, the process is very simple. ApproveForMe connects to your Google Drive account, so you have to make sure you have one. You can either choose a document from your Google Drive, or you can upload one to it and then select the document to send out. Once this is done, you can now specify who you want to send your document to. You can give your document a deadline for approval and you also have the option to make someone required to respond or have it be optional for them. The other nice feature is that you can make it so that the document can be editable by the people you send it to.
Getting a document ready to send to collaborators
Approval Process
Once this process is finished you can send out your document and your recipients will get an email with a link to it so that they can view it. You can either view the document on the web or you can download it to your computer to look at it as well. When you are ready to approve it or not, you can respond by either approving or denying the document and its material. There is also a box where you can leave feedback for the person who sent you the request.
Adding feedback to a document
Once this is done, the originator will get an email saying that the participant has responded. They can check the person’s feedback and whether or not they approved the document or not. Also, if they give the option for editing documents, they will see that feedback as well.
Simple, Effective, Would Love More
The thing that stood out to me about ApproveForMe was the fact that it was so easy to get a document out for approval and getting feedback. It worked great for me and I didn’t run into any problems. But, the one thing that I was a bit skeptical about was the fact that it has tied itself almost 100% with Google. In other words you need to have a Google account in order to access the app. This could be problematic for those that don’t have an account or if you are sending them to recipients that don’t have a Google account as well. For me, that wasn’t a big deal since the school district I work for uses Google, but I can imagine it could become very frustrating for those that don’t have one.
In the future, I would love to see ApproveForMe give the user the ability to just upload documents straight to the web app or give the user other options. I would love to see a connection with Dropbox and other similar services. Similarly, I would love to see more options for editing within the web app itself. I think with these additions, giving the user as well as the participants the ability to just work in the web app is going to be powerful.
Final Thoughts
I really like what ApproveForMe has done so far and I know that they are in the early stages of their app being out there. I think if they can move away from just relying on Google and adding a few more features, they will have a solid app to offer businesses. As much as I love Google and their products, I do know that tying yourself to one app like they have really limits the amount of people that can use it. Not only that, but by doing this, they are really putting their eggs in one basket, so to speak.
Right now they are in public beta, so they are offering their service for free. I am sure as they get past this phase, they will start to offer plans that involve more features that you can pay for. This is one that I will continue to keep an eye out for as they come out of public beta. I am really hoping they add more options other than Google because I really want to use this in the future, but I cannot if they are going to keep it the way it is. I guess time will tell if this will be a solid web app or not.
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