The second update is on the User Account tab under Profile.  You will now notice the option for Name Format.  This allows you to specify how the names of people in the Contacts section will display, making it much easier to manage and browse the list.

Both of these updates are included for all accounts.  We sincerely appreciate the feedback and are always eager to hear your thoughts on improving Mumboe.

From the DocuSign press release:

“With nearly 30,000 unique new DocuSigners joining the DocuSign Global Network every business day, the industry leading electronic signature solution has quickly surpassed more than eight million DocuSigners.  As part of the DocuSign freedom release, the company anticipates even more widespread adoption through a new free edition.”

The growth and adoption of electronic signature is amazing.  And we think the free version of DocuSign is a great option for users that would like to have the ability to occasionally send out a document for electronic signature, but have been hesitant to sign up for a paid account they will rarely use.

Why not sign up for the free edition and tie it in to your Mumboe account so you can give it a try and see how convenient it makes getting a signature from within Mumboe?

And over on the Reports tab you will notice two system reports we have added to the sidebar area that provide more visibility across the repository rather than at a single milestone like the above feature.

The first report will generate a list of all current milestones you have access to that are currently configured to notify someone.  The report includes relevant information about the milestone as well as who is receiving, what method they are using to receive (tracking versus subscription), and when they will receive the notifications.

The second report is helpful for seeing what milestones you have access to that are not currently configured to notify anyone.  Requesting this information comes up quite a bit with our clients as they are often auditing to make sure nothing is going to be accidentally overlooked.

Our rapid growth and the vast amount of data being added to our database on a daily basis caused us to rethink our searching and indexing strategy.  After researching ways to optimize our current system, we ultimately decided to make the switch to a more scalable solution.  We chose to go with Solr, an open source search platform from the Apache Lucene project.

With much anticipation we rolled out our new search engine over the weekend and we are very pleased with the results.  In many cases, clients are getting search results approximately 2 to 10 times faster than before.  The indexing of new data is happening in about 15 minutes.  And the results are much more robust as Solr does a great job with partial matches.

We are looking forward to our continued work with Solr and finding ways to optimize the performance even further while also introducing new features supported by this platform.  We would love to hear your feedback on new search related features you would like to see or if you have noticed a significant improvement we would like to hear your story.

And how could we not wrap up this post without at least one more Top Gun quote from Maverick, “I’ll hit the brakes, he’ll fly right by.”

Via the Mumboe API, the integration allows Outlook users seamless access to Mumboe without having to log into our web interface.  The current release allows users to: attach documents from Mumboe into new emails; save emails as notes on existing records in Mumboe; and save documents as new records in Mumboe.  The plugin is compatible with Outlook 2003 and above.

We already have additional features in the works and are open to suggestions from our users.  Beta spots are limited so please contact a Mumboe account representative if you would like to participate.

Once the integration has been configured you will see the option to start the electronic signature process from the Document Summary of any finalized document.

Then specify the email address of the people you want to sign the document.

Add in information regarding the subject and body of the email the signers will receive.  And optionally you can launch DocuSign for more advanced options.

Once the document has been sent out for electronic signature you will see the status on the Document Summary.

After the document has been signed, the document status will automatically update in Mumboe and the signed version of the document is available through the user interface.

Contact your account representative for more information on this feature and for details about configuring this option in your account.

From any saved report you will now see an option that says “Schedule for Emailing” near the name of the report.  Check this box to reveal the email scheduling options.  You can send the report results to any valid email address(es), and you have the option to specify whether you would like the attached results file to be in CSV or XLSX format.  The form allows you to specify how often the results will be emailed for a specified number of times or within a certain date range.  Once the setup is finished, click the Save and Run Report button.  Mumboe will process the requests overnight and email the results.

From the main Reports screen you will see when the report is scheduled to be emailed next.

To use Active Directory authentication, your company IT department must have an Active Directory server exposed to the Internet and available for encrypted connections over SSL. For additional security, your IT department may limit which computers may connect to their servers. If so, they will need to allow connections from Mumboe.

This feature is included with Jumbo accounts.  Contact your account representative or support for additional details and to get started.

Mumboe always allowed export in CSV format, but our customers wanted more and we agreed. With the new export to Excel feature, the sort order and column width displayed within the interface is exported to your Excel file.  And we have added formatting to the file for bold, shade and freeze the header row.

The file is exported to XLSX format which is native to Microsoft Office 2007 and above.  And for those of you still stuck with Office 2003 (myself included) you can install the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack directly from Microsoft allowing you to open DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files.

The good news is that the Mumboe application is not hosted on EC2 and was up the entire time, so there was no disruption to the users of our application.

For our website, eventually we just moved it to a different instance and things are back to normal.  I’m sure countless anti-cloud articles will be written because of the disruption today, but in truth the cloud runs on hardware in data centers and is not infallible. Whether you are Amazon or a small business, sometimes hardware fails.  The key is contingency planning for when problems do arise, but the trick is balancing the cost of redundancy against the risk of exposure. EC2 recommends having a clone available to be deployed to another availability zone in cases like this.

We sincerely hope this inconvenience wasn’t a problem for those of you researching and considering using Mumboe.  As always, feel free to contact us at any time with questions.