Offering more flexible document sharing to its customers, ShareMethods has announced the availability of an upgrade of its cloud-based service.

The new facility ensures secure collaboration when a customer needs to share and collaborate on a select set of files with an organization outside the company (e.g. a sales team is working with a marketing consultant and iterating on project deliverables). To upload files that they want to work on and then easily send a secure link to the outside consultant with upload enabled, the customer can create or use an existing content category. The external collaborator can then easily download, edit, and upload the files, the company stated in a press release.

“Jimnahs Miller, Partner Account Executive at Evolution1, said, “The ShareMethods flexible sharing model for our on-demand documents works exactly as desired. Instead of having to manually copy and paste links to documents, whenever I share an entire document category with an external client, I just share a category link. This feature was easy to use, just as I expected it to be, delivering key sales and marketing materials quickly and efficiently, saving us time and money and enhancing client satisfaction.”

To access relevant documents, a customer can create a branded secure web page for each of their key clients. For example a global organization working with hundreds of clients may need to get specific collateral and contracts to each client. Or, a global company that offers sales materials to various retail outlets may need to provide unique versions to specific store locations.

In November 2009, the company announced the availability of ShareSpaces for AppExchange on the Salesforce.com (News - Alert) AppExchange. ShareMethods' other AppExchange offerings include ShareNow for document sharing and collaboration, ShareOffice for document creation and electronic signing on-demand and ShareSpaces, for private ad-hoc sharing spaces. ShareSpaces’ three-step wizard lets users set up brand-specific ShareSpaces by creating document categories and inviting users with defined roles for collaboration.