One of the many remarkable ways that Web technologies have changed how business is done is Web-based “workflow,” an online system that manages the sequence of steps required to perform a business process.
The first area that online workflow changed (way back in the very late ’90s) was sales; Web-based e-commerce systems made it possible to show consumers products, let them drill down into the details, add chosen items to virtual shopping carts, and then make a purchase. On the backend of that workflow were connections that drove supporting functions such as inventory management and customer service.
What this did for business was to create an efficient, no-surprises process pipeline. But then it got better: Adding a service like Salesforce to that kind of workflow gave a highly integrated, thoroughly instrumented, and potentially extremely efficient methodology for doing business from prospecting to after sales service.
Today you’ll find online workflow supporting all kinds of group functions from document sharing to customer service and new, more specialized services keep appearing.
An example of this is a new service that has thoroughly impressed me, ReviewPad. ReviewPad addresses a business process that I haven’t seen another company tackle: Creative materials development.
If you’re sourcing or producing creative content such as advertising or marketing graphics and copy, even if you use e-mail and online presentation tools to mediate the development and approvals process, it will still be a messy process as the various tools aren’t coordinated.
For example, you get a multi-megabyte illustration for an ad via a link on a Web site or from an FTP server, download it, and use whatever imaging tool your operating system provides then reply via e-mail remembering hopefully to copy the other members of the team.
By the time you’ve been around that loop half-a-dozen times you’ve lost track of the various messages and iterations of the content involved so you usually have to go through a complete review of everything you’ve looked over assuming you can find all of the bits. It’s all very inefficient.
ReviewPad makes this process very “clean.” You can post images and related files, make and review comments alongside the creative content, and manage approvals.
You create a “pad” then upload your “comps” (the industry term for “mockup” of a graphic) and other files. ReviewPad has excellent file format support including ai, bmp, csv, doc, docx, eps, gif, htm, html, jpeg, mpg, pdf, ppt, psd, tiff, txt, rtf, xls, and xlsx.
ReviewPad creates thumbnails for each item and you can select whether the pad is for Comments & Feedback, Request Approval, or View/Download files only and control whether to display responses to all reviewers, whether you want to be notified on response submissions, and whether to allow downloading of the original files. You then invite reviewers by listing their e-mail addresses and ReviewPad sends out the invites.
Reviewers can drop a “pin” anywhere on the image of any item (the system renders all uploaded items as images) and add an annotation. You can reply to existing annotations and, if approvals are enabled, approve, deny or approve with changes.
A facility I’d like to see would be the ability to include a Web site so the image of a URL could be captured for review (preferably with multiple browser renderings). It would also be useful to be able to segregate users as view-only, view-annotate, or view-annotate-approve.
It’s worth noting that the developers of ReviewPad could have chosen to use Flash which, for the style of interactivity required, would have been an obvious choice. Instead the entire site is implemented, really beautifully, in AJAX.
This means that a ReviewPad pad can be viewed on pretty much any device though on iOS devices you’ll find when you view an image that is bigger than the display area you can’t drag the image to see the hidden parts, because a press and drag interaction grabs and moves the entire browser display frame.
All ReviewPad accounts allow an unlimited number of documents to be uploaded and an unlimited number of reviewers. All subscription accounts add e-mail support, a custom URL (mycompany.reviewpad.net – the default is the account name at the second level domain name), 128-bit SSL encryption, your organization’s logo and colors, and enhanced annotation tools.
The four account levels are Free, Professional ($9.95 per month), Team ($39.95 per month), and Corporate ($149.95 per month) and respectively provide 0.5GB, 2GB, 10GB, and 50GB of storage.
The Free and Professional accounts allow for only one user (the person uploading and managing the account) while Team subscriptions allow up to five users, and Corporate subscriptions permit unlimited users.
ReviewPad is a really great concept and a fine example of focusing on niche market and delivering a really solid product.
