activEcho 3.0 – The User Side of Things

If you read my previous entry, you could tell that I’m all about talking to customers in IT first, then putting my head down to deliver what Enterprise IT groups are demanding in terms of control, security, management and visibility.

But as in any good product, management is only one half of the story. The other half is all about the product’s users. 

From conversations with clients, it’s apparent that mobile users everywhere are depending on one or more devices to do their jobs. They work from home, a cafe, at a client’s location or out in the field. Simply speaking, they are not tied to a desk from 9 to 5 anymore. And if companies want the same or higher levels of productivity, they need to give their employees access to documents, no matter where they are, no matter what device they use, 24x7. 

Even working from a desk, they often need to share some of those documents with colleagues or business partners. We used to just print off documents or email them back and forth dealing with compatibility issues. These are not effective solutions. Users need something really easy and natural, or they will use the consumer tools such as Dropbox that they normally have at hand. 

That is why I put speaking with clients and end-users first. This way we keep enhancing the user experience so they ‘feel at home’ while complying with the security and confidentiality requirements demanded by their organizations. Best case scenario is that the user experience is so smooth that they don’t even notice the management side! 

Here are a few things we’ve done to help users ‘feel at home’:

• Do more with less effort – Building on top of the already rich functionality we had in our mobile app, we added built in Office document editing. Word, Excel, PowerPoint. No need for another app to do that.
• Share on the go – From your iOS or Android device, select a folder or file, and invite colleagues or business partners.
• Smarter and easier web interfaces – Drag and drop, auto-complete, type ahead, and new notifications make this completely re-designed interface even easier and clearer. 
• For global clients – User interfaces and notifications are in multiple languages: English, Japanese, German, and French.
• Mac and PC sync clients now include functional, status and performance enhancements too.

Bottom line, the quest to balance ease of use for users, with control, security and management demanded by IT continues…

This is activEcho 3.0. Big release.  Great stuff.

Enjoy.