Take 5 seconds and think, you know it’s true—the sting of digging through the message threads to find your teammates’ shared links or requests for feedback.
That’s why Cloudo for Teams, the new product which we are releasing today in private beta, decided to tackle the problem of the extra legwork that everyone’s been putting in.
If you don’t wanna look like a jerk that gives his/her teammates the cold shoulder, surely you can minimize the window, go to Asana, create a task, type in the name and then set a due date to remind yourself to give them feedback.
Or you can simply use Cloudo for Teams to save you all the hassle once-and-for-all.
To have a chat about the team product, Lea.Liao had a sit-down with Ondrej Prostrednik, CEO of Cloudo. The transcript of our conversation follows:
Lea: Let’s kick off by talking about how Cloudo started?
Ondrej: We realized that the first problem we needed to solve is searching your data across different cloud services. Today, everything is in the cloud. If you want to open a file, you have to open a cloud service, search within a service to find it, it takes a lot of time. If you don’t remember where the file is, you need to look for it from service to service. So we wanted to create one place for people to quickly access all their data.
Lea: About Cloudo for Teams, what was the inspiration?
Ondrej: First off we always want to do something for teams, because file-sharing usually happens within a team. We want to build a product that fits the specific needs of a team that closely works together and exchanges a lot of files. Second off, we were getting interests from teams even if we didn’t have a team product, until now. We realized that teams have bigger needs to boost their productivity.
Lea: So product-wise, how is Cloudo for teams different from the prodcut we have now?
Ondrej: It’s nicely built on top of the searching feature we have today, but we added features based on the specific use-cases that a team would have — Specifically around sharing and collaborating.
In terms of sharing, today you have to generate a link and send it to someone through a channel. That channel can be email, Slack or Facebook message. But within Cloudo for teams, you can bypass that. You can send the file directly to your teammate.
You have a list of all your teammates inside Cloudo, you simply find the file you want to share and you click on the teammate, and this teammate will automatically receive your file on his or her computer.
Also, we did it to solve the problem that a lot of teams face: the difficulty of going back to the files that were shared with you because they are scattered across different channels, you might received the link over email or Slack. All that confusion makes you go and dig for that link, but with Cloudo, it’s all organized into one place. You can share faster, organize the shared data, keep track of what has been sent to you and also what you shared with the others.
Lea: So the three pillars of Cloudo for Teams are searching, sharing and collaborating, right?
Ondrej: Yes and in terms of collaborating, when you share a file within a team, usually you’re looking for their inputs and feedback. Again, the feedback is always scattered across the channels, like Google Drive and Evernote, or Dropbox. That’s why we want to help unify this so that all the feedback within the team is collected in one place.
Secondly, with Slack and Hipchat, quick exchange of info is made easy. But if you want concise feedback, these tools sometimes complicate the situation. For example, the person you need feedback from, they may be unavailable at the minute and your request gets lost in the stream of new messages. Or, they quickly reply to you with not very well thought out feedback. And then you are left with reminding everyone that you need the feedback.
If you’re collaborating, for example, collecting feedback, it’s much better to use Cloudo because it keeps the discussion and feedback focused on that one piece of work. Your teammates’ requests for feedback are stored in Cloudo, whenever you need to go back and work on it, it’s there, not buried in the flow of chat. On the Cloudo dashboard, your teammate can easily see your requests and you’re notified the second your teammate gives you feedback.
Lea: What is your vision for this team product, what is the end game?
Ondrej: The end game is to be one of the best document collaboration products for teams. For searching, sharing and collaborating, you use Cloudo. We are not replacing current communicating channels, for example, we are tightly integrated into Slack. Our role here is saving people the extra legwork of “digging through their channels”
Lea: What do you think would be the perfect kind of team to use this product?
Ondrej: We believe that this product fits the teams that heavily rely on the exchange of files and notes. Like teams in marketing, software development, education (We’ve been getting some attention from this industry for a long time.) And we also have a few law firms that are interested in our product too.
Lea: At approximately what time will we be able to see this product?
Ondrej: We are testing the product in private beta right now and it will be available soon.
