Edocr - Product Review

Here is a Quick Introduction to edocr from their blog.I wanted to review this product so I signed up.

I played around with it for considerable amount of time( in hours) and here are my observations and suggestions on the product.

My Observations

• Edocr allows only DOC, PDF,PS and TXT to be uploaded. Here is my first question: What would be different between DOC and PPT considering that they both are commonly used in business communication as a common form information presentation. TechCrunch and TechCrunch UK mention ‘…they keep the ‘pool’ of documents relatively untainted by those terrible PP presentations.‘
• It doesn’t allow one to upload documents without entering the title, tag and description-and these are tagged as important and mandatory for upload.
• No bulk upload option available
• I uploaded a pdf after entering information into the title, tag and description area. Now, it returned an error saying that description is too short AND that the description should be atleast 10 words. This should have been provided as an instruction when the user is entering the information and not afterwards, for it is a terribly frustrating thing to have to go and retype all this when one is in a hurry to upload the files
• Tried viewing the file- it took me to a “View” tab- and even after 2 hours (as per the time statistics in the home page) I am not able to see my pdf. It says ‘processing document’. But the number of views kept increasing for every try although the document is not yet viewable.
• Since it was processing my document for quite sometime, I checked out another pdf that was uploaded by someone else. It opens a macromedia flashpaper based viewer(your browser should have javascript enabled).

Suggestions (in my limited observation):

• Need to provide more flexibility in tagging and entering other relevant information. Should allow editing or even entering such metadata the first time the file is accessed after uploading. The users should know that if they enter information on upload, they have chances of faster indexing, failing which, indexing will happen only on second pass or something to that effect. A disclaimer to the user conveying the benefits of tags and description will prompt them to be more reasonable and understanding.
• Need bulk upload facility
• Update views after documents are processed and actually open and available for viewing, so the count relates to the actual views.
• A “Next” button for subsequent pages in the viewer should be helpful. It could also help in the manner in which the pages are downloaded.
• If PPT’s are not allowed, then landscape viewing might help those who convert PPT to PDF and upload to edocr.

Tags: document sharing, edocr, Product Review, youtube of documents