May 2007 Release (rev 8298)

The most notable new features in this release is:

• Shared Workspace, allow groups of people to work together in a common environment. Spreadsheets in a shared workspace are co-owned by all the workspace members. (#4028)
• New spreadsheet sharing interface. The previous three paged “Share to Public”, “Share with Password” and “Share to Users” interface are combined into one with a more intuitive workflow. (#6481)
• More scalable backend architecture. We can now handle a lot more concurrent users with more predictable response time.

Other new features include:

• Support fetching data from a password protected spreadsheet web fetch through web-fetch (see the forum discussion) (#6674)
• A new “remove all” button in remote data dialog (#6747)
• Added hyperlink function “=hyperlink(href,text)” (#6652)
• A tooltip to notify users of new features. You should have noticed that we’re using it to promote our Shared Workspace feature already. (#5974)

Also fixed in this release are:

• Freeze-pane not properly exported in XLS format (#5204)
• Phantom editing of unauthorized sheets (#5901, #6661)
• Cell comment rendering problems (#6609, #6635, #6657)
• Properly handle permalinks of spreadsheets with a trailing dot (#5937)

Other enhancements:

• More prominent unlock button for password-protected sheets (#4822)
• Optimization of the Chat protocol - now consume less bandwidth

Right after David wrote that EditGrid is no longer under-the-radar, we have received another accolade. EditGrid is selected by Rafe Needleman et al as one of the Webware 100 Finalists. We are in the Productivity category among many other great webwares.And that’s not the end of story – voting has just commenced. Voting closes on 11th June, and on 18th June the top 10 webwares in the 10 categories will be announced as winners of the Webware 100 contest. Let’s all vote for your favourite productivity webware now!

EditGrid were recently selected by SEOmoz as one of the winners of the Web 2.0 Awards 2007. It seems that we are the only Hongkong- and China-based company among the awardees.

Not so long ago, we were still under-the-radar. This is no longer the case any more, it seems:

Ray Ozzie, in an interview with Reuters on 1st May, said that Microsoft is watching EditGrid and a few others.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, named EditGrid as “the best online spreadsheet he has ever seen” and we’ve “hit a home run” in his keynote of the Software 2007 Conference.

The good news: we are noticed!

The bad news: we are noticed!!

Looking at our ever growing list of bugs and feature requests, we know we are not there yet. Anyway, it is something we should be proud of. Our focus remains:

Keep on innovating, keep on delivering.

Trading Comps, a great mashup site of EditGrid for financial zealots to share financial spreadsheets, is launched today. Congratulations to the Dave Schmierer, the creator of Trading Comps.

Quoting Dave:

“TradingComps.com is a new website for user-contributed spreadsheets about finance and investing. Built with EditGrid’s best-in-class online spreadsheet software, this website was designed to help individuals produce, share, and consume financial data and analysis. Individual investors as well as financial professionals have few free resources outside of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) website to assist them in analyzing financial data. I think that giving people the ability to collaborate on financial analysis with others online has the potential to make it a lot easier and a lot more interesting for those who practice it. EditGrid is the key to making this collaboration possible by not only providing an easy way for individuals to upload and edit their spreadsheets, but also by providing a variety of ways for individuals to share their spreadsheets with others and giving the owner a number of different tools to control access. Trading Comps welcomes anyone to visit and contribute to building a better resource of financial data and analysis together!”

Trading Comps is a live demonstration of how to make good use of EditGrid’s User API and Partner API to serve your users. Now, Trading Comps users can contribute and share financial data and analysis through EditGrid spreadsheets. See the screenshots:

Trading Comps homepage

EditGrid spreadsheets in Trading Comps

Sharing of Charts!

Contribution of financial data by user community

Want to build your mashup on EditGrid? Our User API is ready for most uses. Check it out and have fun with it! Alternatively, if you would like to take advantage of the premium features of the Partner API such as user provisioning, contact us at partnership@editgrid.com.

How about building a site for basketball or baseball stats? Anyone?

Okay, I hold my hands up, I’m late to blog about this.

I was actually in Japan when StartForce announced its launch on 19th April. All the major press and blog coverages are in Japanese.

Read this post on the official StartForce Blog about the release of EditGrid in StartForce. If you read Japanese, you may be interested in this manual as well. The announcement was picked up by Nikkei BPNet, CNET Japan and a few other blogs.

StartForce is an Ajax web desktop offering. EditGrid is of course it’s online spreadsheet app. With EditGrid on Startforce, StartForce users can open and edit MS Excel files stored on StartForce. StartForce also localised EditGrid into Japanese for its users.

How does it look? Nice! See below.

EditGrid in Startforce

Localised EditGrid Interface

In January, we launched EditGrid at Salesforce.com’s AppExchange platform. Since then, all upgrades we have for EditGrid.com are also available to our Salesforce.com integration. But today, we have launched a major enhancement specifically for our users at Salesforce.com in response to the market and user feedbacks.

Market Feedback

Ismael Ghalimi at IT|Redux named integration with Salesforce.com the top missing feature in most online spreadsheet offering in his online spreadsheet roundup post. Ismael said: “A typical use case would be to dynamically embed data produced by Salesforce.com reports into a spreadsheet, merge it with data provided by third-party services, then produce charts from it.”

We also received similar feature requests from Salesforce.com users. The challenge, for many users, is to produce the same graph type for different sets of data, out of the same report. EditGrid’s capability to produce charts and analysis based on Salesforce.com’s reports is seen by many as a huge value proposition to Salesforce.com users.

The New Feature

We listen. Now we have this ready for you.

Instead of importing the Salesforce.com reports as a new spreadsheet file every time, we can now overwrite the old data in the existing report spreadsheet stored in EditGrid. The charts and everything additional the users did (i.e. analysis metrics, etc.) on other sheets of the same workbook will stay intact. Every time a user opens the report, he/she would get the latest report data plus all the metrics and charts updated with the latest data (provided that he has the formula right :P)

Here are some screenshots of the latest features.

The “EditGrid Reports” Tab

Report Data refreshed…

… Charts and analysis stay intact

About Salesforce.com’s Support

I would like to take this opportunity to share our experience with AppExchange. From the very beginning to launch, their team have worked closely with us throughout. I’m really impressed by that. They spent time to comment on the integration and find bugs we’ve overlooked. After we released the app, they included our app in the listing, blogged about it, and brought actual traffic to our app. When their CEO passed by our city, he took us out for lunch and arranged media opportunity for us. (Thanks Marc!). Have I mentioned everything is all free?

All of the above plus the opportunity of getting access to the close to 1 million Salesforce.com users, the majority of whom are early adopters of latest web technologies. Can there be better offerings on earth?

EditGrid’s AppExchange Exposure

You will be seeing EditGrid more often in AppExchange. We are forming partnerships and our partners also have their AppExchange offerings. EditGrid is now included in three AppExchange offerings, including our official integration, Central Desktop’s Customer Extranet and ShareMethods’s ShareOffice.

It’s pretty exciting.

ShareOffice is launched in Software 2007 today. A few days ago, ShareOffice was soft launched on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange platform and quickly became an App of the Week. Their launch is also picked up by StartupSquad and Read/WriteWeb.

ShareOffice provides an online office application for easy and quick creation, management, and sharing of online documents, spreadsheets, and more. Users save time by using editable templates populated with CRM data to create sales and marketing materials. By integrating with Salesforce.com, ShareOffice delivers online office in context. EditGrid forms part of the ShareOffice offering by providing the online spreadsheet component.

Office components integrated to ShareOffice through an open standard called OpenSAM. It defines how applications do single sign-on and file handling so that different applications can work seamlessly with each other like a single application. Since EditGrid has a comprehensive API layer, it’s easy for us to support OpenSAM.

It’s been fun working with Eric of ShareMethods, Tom of iNetOffice and Jason of Preezo. Here’s wishing ShareMethods a successful launch.

Here are a few screenshots:

ShareOffice in AppExchange

EditGrid in ShareOffice