Bruce Malyon
In September MaxxVault, LLC announced the release of MaxxVault Enterprise 6.0, the latest version of its document management solution. The new version has more than 200 new features and enhancements, including a completely re-designed MaxxCloud interface optimized for mobile devices. To get a better understanding of MaxxVault Enterprise 6.0 and what it means to the reseller community I spoke with MaxxVault CEO Bruce Malyon.
With the trend towards BYOD to work and mobile devices, this seems like a good time to release a new version?
Malyon: We pretty much spent the last 15 months re-thinking the Web architecture. One of the things we took a gamble on was taking what we wrote for the past 3½ years, throwing it out, and starting from scratch. We’ve been able to optimize the interface for tablet and mobile devices. Other applications use a ‘Lite’ mobile interface—you can search on it, and maybe hit an ‘Approve’ or ‘Reject’ button to do a workflow—but our interface has been designed to work fully on mobile and tablet platforms. Whatever you can do on a full Web interface you can do on our mobile platform.
It’s unique compared to what most other vendors are doing for mobile. Most other vendors you can go in and do a search and pull up a document, but they’re not designed to do heavy workflow or importing documents via the cloud. The other thing we’re proud of is we have print to cloud, scan to cloud, and Microsoft Add-In to the cloud. So whatever you can do with an on-premise solution where you can go from Outlook and save a file directly into your on-premise solution, it can now go to a hosted solution that has the same look and feel for the end user.
You’ve added many new features and enhancements to MaxxVault Enterprise 6.0, what are the highlights?
Malyon: From a core functionality perspective we’ve added roughly 200 new features/enhancements. I’ve seen some press releases [from competitors], one had 10,000+ new features and enhancements, which I think the majority are really improvements to code rather than brand new features.
One of the major new features is what I just spoke about, the tools you use day to day— Outlook and Microsoft applications and now being able to use them to send critical files directly to a hosted solution. This is a unique feature that gives our partners a competitive advantage. We’re the only product in the ECM market to my knowledge that actually has all five variations of e-signatures in the core product. All of these e-signature tools are our own coded solutions. Everybody can use a stamp tool to use as a signature, which is not secure, but we have the ability to store an encrypted signature in the database and tie it to their password, support for PKI level e-signatures via MaxxCloud and support for hardware signature pads. The last thing we just added was the ability to sign on your iPad, iPhone or Android devices with a finger or a stylus.
I read that mid-sized and large companies will find MaxxVault Enterprise 6.0 more appealing because of new integration tools like MaxxBolt and enhancements that have been introduced into the reporting and workflow modules. Can you tell me more about MaxxBolt and the workflow modules?
Malyon: MaxxBolt is designed based on a feature I saw in a product 10 years ago. There was a Unix-based product that had a floating toolbar concept, but all it could do was search. One of the things we always get asked for is tight integration with different applications. ‘Can you integrate with that, can you integrate with this?’
It’s tough to do all integrations out of the box so I wanted to come up with a solution where people had the ability to integrate at the screen level without having necessarily to use hot keys, without having to use any .net integration. The concept of MaxxBolt is you can have your accounting screen on the screen and MaxxBolt stays in place wherever you position it on the screen and if you hit the search button it knows you’re in your accounting application and will grab a specific piece of data and run a search in MaxxVault.
Or if you switch your application and go into your HR application and hit that same search button, it’s intelligent to know you’re in the HR application because that’s the active screen. I made it easy to configure so an admin can figure it and can pretty much work with any screen where it can grab text, but MaxxBolt also allows you access to your workflow queue.
Everybody says: ‘I want to get workflow via e-mail’, or ‘I have to log on from a Web client or a Windows client’. Even e-mail is a pain. It becomes a pain because I don’t want to track e-mails, especially on an iPhone. How do you sort them? What if someone is using Gmail? We made it easy for the casual user, they can click on a workflow queue, see the documents so they have a visual queue, and can click on it and see the workflow, and have the same workflow features that would appear on the cloud or the desktop version. They also get access to any other search that may not be related to their line of business applications. It’s big in medical and helped us win a couple of large enterprise accounts in the medical arena because of that capability.
You also have MaxxVault Standard Edition, what was the inspiration behind that?
Malyon: We compete in the mid to enterprise space, which was the background of the company I worked for before founding MaxxVault. When we first started the company clients that came on were already enterprise clients who had 15 million + records in their legacy system. We had no choice but to start bigger and eventually add features to catch up and eventually start going down market.
What we did was come up with MaxxDocs. That was a good concept, but no one wants to spend time selling a $2,500 solution. There’s no money in it for the dealer either. It’s just as hard to sell a $12,000-$20,000 solution so why not focus there. We figured everybody loves MaxxVault Enterprise so why don’t we introduce a solution that offers named users. What it does is cuts the cost by 45-50 percent and makes us more competitive in the entry market where our product is head and shoulders above most and I don’t have to worry about what features are on one product versus the other. The only difference is named users and concurrent users.
From a workflow standpoint, we added a ton of enterprise-type features into workflow. We can have an inactivity notice at each step in the workflow process and also have different customizable e-mail templates that get sent out as part of the escalation and we now have the ability to kick off not just one workflow but several workflows from within a workflow. We also added a workflow manager tool via MaxxCloud for easy management for enterprise workflows.
What we put into our product is primarily pushed by our client base. Of the 200 new features, I’d say at least 70% came from client requests.
Are you already thinking up more new features for the next release?
Malyon: The next major release probably won’t be for another 9-12 months, but our next minor release will be in February. We’re well on our way and further enhancements are going into our eForms platform and creator tool, getting into midmarket forms processing. We want to compete in the SMB forms processing market. We are working on some exciting connectors for Drop Box, Sales Force and Gmail. That’s the short term road map.
