Xcellery

Xcellery joins eXpresso

2007-11-27T08:00:00.000-08:00

Dear Xcellery Friend,

I have some very important and exciting news to share with you. Two years ago I put together a very talented team to find a better way for people to share spreadsheets over the Internet. We created Xcellery, and together with you, we became pioneers in using the web for business collaboration. We are proud to say that today we are helping thousands of users all over the world to collaborate in their daily work. We know the concept works, and that’s why we have been carefully thinking about our next big step.

I’m delighted to announce that we found the perfect partner for us: eXpresso! eXpresso is an online collaboration community for Microsoft Excel. They have invited us to join forces, and we are excited to do so. The people behind eXpresso think just like us and are dedicated to providing the most sophisticated online collaboration service. eXpresso provides an outstanding product and has all the resources required to become the next big thing.

As a result of our partnership, operations at Xcellery.com will discontinue on December 31, 2007. We wholeheartedly recommend you take a good look at eXpresso. It has all the great features you were looking for when you found Xcellery and even more. Switching to eXpresso will be easy. Simply open a free account and upload your spreadsheets. We are standing by and ready to answer any questions or assist with your transition. I truly appreciate your support, and I’m glad for the chance to introduce you to eXpresso.

Best Regards,

Reto Laemmler, Founder and CEO

P.S. You can find out more about eXpresso at http://www.expressocorp.com/. You are also welcome to send email questions to info@expressocorp.com.

Press Release (PDF)

Xcellery seeks exciting new direction with eBay

2007-08-01T18:04:00.000-07:00

Xcellery is the leading online collaboration solution for Microsoft Office. It allows several people to edit the same Office file at the same time from anywhere, eliminating the need to consolidate and resend newer versions of the same document. Xcellery currently supports Microsoft Excel, synchronizing team spreadsheets in near real time. In the immediate works is the Xcellery Enterprise Edition, deeper Excel format support, increased cell limit and faster workbook loading.

Xcellery has come amazingly far, it acquired close to 10,000 subscribers, was ranked Top 5 at the UTR Office 2.0 conference, is available on SalesForce.com/AppExchange - even with the limited resources available. To better service our clients and bring new features more quickly to our users, the management team at Xcellery has decided to seek greater funding with new ownership for our next phase of growth.

Founder and CEO Reto Laemmler says: "We believe that our next generation investor and owner will find Xcellery to be a powerful platform to simplify the difficulties of online collaboration in the office space." Prospective investors and owners are invited to review Xcellery's e-auction and inquire into details of the offering before making their offers. We chose eBay because it provides us the most democratic and attention-getting way to reach out and find the perfect partner.

The Xcellery team is looking forward to working with the future owner and other potential partners for the exciting new phase of market growth.

Survey results

2007-07-05T18:41:00.001-07:00

Thanks everybody for participating in the survey. We had a very very positive outcome! Below are the results. In our next blog, we will present you a road map which outlines how we are going to turn your feedback into reality.

We want to improve

We want you back

Congratulations to the winner of the Office 2007 Professional.
We also gave away an Xcellery T-Shirt to our 2nd and 3rd winner.
Do you want one too? Our T-shirts are hot and unique. Get yours for only $25 dollars. We will use it as your personal investment into Xcellery. :-)

Tell us what you think - Win an Office 2007

2007-06-25T15:48:00.000-07:00

Xcellery has been successfully running for over a year! We would like to know what you think. Take a minute to complete one of the short surveys to help us know how to improve Xcellery, and we'll enter you in a drawing for a FULL version of Office 2007 Professional. The WINNER will be announced at the end of this month.

I'm a frequent Xcellery user : http://xcellery.wufoo.com/forms/we-want-to-improve/

I checked it out but don't use it anymore: http://xcellery.wufoo.com/forms/we-want-you-back/

PowerShell and Amazon S3

2007-05-30T16:40:00.000-07:00

We just implemented the Xcellery backup using the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and PowerShell script!

Amazon S3 is a storage for the internet. It provides a web service interface that we can use to store any files in a safe and secure place. PowerShell is command line shell and scripting language from Microsoft. One of the key features for PowerShell is it is object-based and can access .NET objects. Since Amazon S3 uses a web service interface, with a little work, it can become a set of PowerSell Commandlets. By combining both, we can write a elegant script that backup our files and upload to S3 automatically.

PowerShell and Amazon S3 rock!

The video I was waiting for - STIRR 2.4!

2007-05-23T12:12:00.000-07:00

A month ago, Heng-yi (Chief Architect), Dwight (Marketing adviser) and myself presented Xcellery at STIRR 2.4. The event is famous for its 60 seconds pitch. You go on stage and tell within 1 minute what your company does. I was really nervous but survived. :-) During the event, Alison McNeill from bub.blicio.us interviewed me. Watch it below, a video I was long waiting for. I'm the 2nd person interviewed. Have fun!

SaaS vs. On-premise

2007-05-12T08:46:00.000-07:00

Web 2.0, the mother of SaaS (Software as a Service) has introduced a huge paradigm shift in regards of software deployment and consumption. SalesForce.com, Google Docs & Spreadsheets and others are good examples for it. A service provider hosts and stores the application as well as the data in the cloud. The convenience of on-demand software often overpowers the concerns for security and reliability. But "luckily" there will always be a large group of companies/users for which it is out of question to store data externally. Unfortunately such companies won't be able to take advantage of the good things SaaS offers, unless it's brought to them in-house.

Xcellery isn't a pure SaaS and fits more the SaS (Software and Service) model. It combines the power of your already installed dekstop software with the power of our collaboration service. Xcellery has been live for a little over a year. We keep listening very carefully to our customers and realize that there is a lot of interest towards the Xcellery Enterprise Edition (XEE). Our users like to explore the possibilities with www.xcellery.com but eventually want to store the data securely behind their own firewalls. Excel is a business tool and often used to process confidential data.

For us here at Xcellery it's important to support both models Sa(a)S and On-premise. Up till now www.xcellery.com has been priority but the feedback is clear, we can't go without XEE.

Maintenance release & STIRR

2007-04-04T00:59:00.000-07:00

We just uploaded a maintenance release v1.37. We cleaned and fixed many small things and put our infrastructure in place for some new upcoming features.
We replaced the digital signature behind the VBA macros. We switched from Verisign to GlobalSign. The first time you open an Xcellery spreadsheet in Excel you will get prompted to trust the new publisher again. See here.

We were invited to present at the STIRR in Palo Alto next week. That's great because the waiting list for the event seems to be very large. We get 60 seconds to pitch.

Huge success! Xcellery in the Top 5!

2007-03-28T11:14:00.000-07:00

Last week's Office 2.0 conference was a huge success for us! We were the audience winner in our category and also selected to be in the Top 5 out of 32 presenting companies.

Watch the video here!

This success really boosts our energy and motivation to continue building the greatest online collaboration service for Microsoft Excel! Thanks for all your support!

From "Under...." to "On The Radar"

2007-03-22T12:55:00.000-07:00

We are proud to present at the Office 2.0 conference organized by "Under the Radar". It's a great opportunity present Xcellery and to network with people all around the world. We get 6 minutes to tell the story! Tonight we'll warm up with the UTR VIP party first. :-)

March STIRR

2007-03-21T16:56:00.000-07:00

STIRR
Originally uploaded by fetching.

We had a blast at the STIRR event this March. Heng-yi (Chief Architect) and myself enjoyed meeting and talking to many new entrepreneurs and other fella's.

Tonight we'll be presenting at the SFBETA.

Cheers,
Reto

SFBeta & New release

2007-02-26T00:43:00.000-08:00

SFBeta
Last Thursday we attended a great social event called SFBeta. Hundreds of entrepreneurs, developers, investors and other curious people attended the event in the beautiful Minna gallery downtown San Francisco. Check out some pics on Flickr. It was the perfect place to tell everybody about your startup. As usual, I ran out of business cards but managed somehow to give people my contact information. We managed to get an invitation for a VC meeting which is really great. Also we met Kelly Parkinson, a very nice woman who writes news and press articles about startups, helping them to get the word out there. This type of service is definitely something we are looking for.

New release
We announced a new release for this Monday morning. Unfortunately many unexpected presentations and other meetings came inbetween causing some delay. We appreciate your patience and we hope to have the release ready by this Wednesday.

Following features/changes are to be expected:

Reference a cell in any spreadsheet you have access to.
Increase max cell limit for SalesForce users to 10000
SSL login and possibly datatransfer (not decided yet)
Some bug fixes

Exciting start in 2007

2007-01-28T00:37:00.001-08:00

Office 2.0 Conference
We are invited to speak at the Office 2.0 conference in Mountain View, CA this coming 23rd March. That's some really exciting news and we get a chance to pitch our idea in front of VC's and 31 other startups. Go Xcellery gooo!

Xcellery Enterprise Edition
We just announced the launch of our private BETA for Xcellery Enterprise Edition. If you like Xcellery but can't store your spreadsheets on a public server that's the solution for you. Contact Us to get the private BETA!

Xcellery Forum
Xcellery launched a forum! Check it out at http://forum.xcellery.com. We encourage you to post your questions there instead of contacting us. This way the knowledge can be shared among the community.

New Public Release
We launched a new public version at www.xcellery.com containing a lot of new stuff.

Last modified in My Documents now shows who did the last modification and how long ago.
Share With doesn't show the list of collaborators anymore. That dialog is only for invitation. Access rights including removal of a collaborator is now fully managed via Access right dialog.
The browser-editor now better supports % and $ formattings.

What's next?
We got tons of customer requests. We listen to you and we'll always build what you are asking for. Be patient because different people have different requirements and we will try to release all your whishes as soon as possible.

A successful 1st year!

2006-12-19T01:04:00.000-08:00

A very successful 1st year in the life of Xcellery reaches its end. Only 8 months ago we launched the service and we are proud to say that within such a short time we got several thousand subscribers and our first paying customers. The interest for our service is very high and people from all over the world are contacting us to learn more about it.

New features
We have been adding many new features to our service. We are proud to say that the entire cell formatting in Excel now is supported. Our latest feature addition is the keyboard support in the My Documents page. Now you can open a workbook entirely using the keyboard. We further improved the performance of the Excel client and added many small features and bug fixes!

What's next?
Software as Service is great but many companies cannot store confidential data on a public server. That's why we decided to bring Xcellery to you. We are in our final testing stages and will soon make a BETA version for "Xcellery for the Intranet" available. The features will be the same as you currently see on www.xcellery.com. The intranet version will be licensed to you. Contact us for the pricing.

We wish you a very nice holiday and we are looking forward to see you back on www.xcellery.com in 2007!

Sincerely,
Your Xcellery Team

Many new features just released!

2006-12-02T13:52:00.000-08:00

We have added a bunch of new features. Go and check them out @ www.xcellery.com

1. Borders are now fully supported

2. Hyperlink and cell links

3. Cell Comments

4. Text in different lines (Alt+Enter)

5. Invite for sharing via drop-down

Remark:
Except Hyperlinks, none of the above Excel features are supported in the browser editor.

Coming soon:

"Xcellery for the Intranet!"

We partnered with ThinkHost

2006-12-01T13:54:00.000-08:00

I'm excited to announce our partnership with ThinkHost a progressive web hosting company from Portland OR. Why did we partner? Collaborall and ThinkHost are both young and progressive companies believing and investing into tomorrow. As a result of the partnership Xcellery services will be provided in ThinkHost's bonus pack. In return we can offer all our existing and new Xcellery subscribers an incredible 6 months free webhosting with ThinkHost. Isn't that a great deal? 6 months free hosting is worth $235 dollars!

A new release is out

2006-11-14T21:30:00.000-08:00

Hi,

I'm excited to announce that we just released a new version of Xcellery.

What's new?
- We did some infrastructure changes and now fully support unicode characters. E.g. chinese, japanese characters will no more turn into question marks.
- We included Adsense in the browser editor. The advertisements don't show up in the paid SalesForce version. If you want to avoid them, simply use "Edit in Excel". :-)
- The login infrastructure was more secured and we now use ASP.NET forms authentication.
- Many small bug fixes and improvements were also fixed along the way.

What's next?
- Soon you will be able to host your own Xcellery! We have been working hard on Xcellery for the Intranet. A release candidate will be available for download soon. I'm very excited for this new product!
- Also we will work on cell hyperlinks and complete cell border support in a cell.
- Of course there is much more but we can't unleash everything at once. Stay tuned! :-)

Collaborall press release

2006-10-17T15:32:00.000-07:00

Xcellery for SalesForce.com!
Collaborall is excited to announce Xcellery for SalesForce.com; the leader in on-demand customer relationship management. Providing Xcellery on the AppExchange (on-demand application-sharing service) gives us the perfect opportunity to reach a wider audience and enrich SalesForce.com with our new and innovative collaboration service for Microsoft Excel. This version of Xcellery is tightly integrated within your SalesForce.com account and is available on a monthly subscription. Click here to see it!

Xcellery vs. Google Spreadsheets
Many people compare Xcellery to Google Spreadsheets. The big difference is Xcellery doesn't try to replace Microsoft Excel, but rather extend it. Online spreadsheets are great for collaboration, but a web application will never be able to provide the same features and computing power as Microsoft Excel. Collaborall took the best of both worlds and created Xcellery. The concept works and we look forward to do the same for Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.

What's next?
We have a lot of exciting new features lined up for you! Per many user requests, we will work on supporting more of the Excel features in Xcellery. We are also working on gadgets for Live.com, Vista Sidebar, My Google, and My Yahoo. Let us know if there is anything you would like to see in Xcellery.

Thousands of users love what we do and come back daily to simplify their life by using www.xcellery.com. Stay tuned @ http://xcellery.blogspot.com

Sincerely,
Your Xcellery Team

Xcellery now available on SalesForce.com

2006-10-03T08:58:00.000-07:00

We are excited to officially announce that Xcellery now is available on SalesForce, the leading on-demand CRM platform!

As part of our business strategy we want to integrate Xcellery in places where it can extend or complement an existing platform. One of these perfect places is SalesForce's AppExchange platform. SalesForce is the one! :-)

Xcellery is directly available from your SalesForce account. Pick and share your workbooks directly from your SalesForce users list. Publish your workbooks on SalesForce Documents. It's all secure and doesn't require any additional log-in.

Check it out @ SalesForce

The integration itself made us taking Xcellery to the next level. We improved lots of performance, security and ease of use.

Performance, security & more

2006-09-19T11:36:00.000-07:00

Hi,

We have been working hard to further improve the performance and security of Xcellery. We minimized the data exchanged between client and server as much as we could. Further to improve the browser-editor perfromance we started creating the worksheet on the server side.
Regarding security, we installed SSL which now let's you use Xcellery via SSL. A workbook opened in Excel fully comunictes via SSL. Try it out @ https://www.xcellery.com. We are still debating which parts to automatically switch to https and which ones not. Some sites only use SSL during login but we might fully switch to https during and after the login. Any feedback and preference would be appreciated here.

Another big part of our last months work was the integration into this business platform I was mentioning earlier. I will tell you the name as soon as we have gone live which should happen hopefully by the end of this month.

We get a lot of requests for additional Excel format support on Xcellery (e.g. named ranges, conditional formatting, lists, grid lines, etc...). Since this is our core compentence we will make sure to give this enough attention over the next few months. We will add such extensions in the Excel client only and haven't planned to extend the browser-editor much in the near future. Xcellery extends Microsoft Excel and that's where we want to be the best!

Cheers,
Reto

People love Xcellery and we just made it better!

2006-08-21T13:41:00.000-07:00

Hi,

Thanks everybody for all the nice compliments we received in the past month. It really feels good and gives us the energy to make Xcellery better day by day. We have been working extremly hard and improved many things.

What's new:
- Control Read/Write Access per workbook and user

- Load/Save performance is much improved using Excel.
- Worksheet positions are persisted now
- Send email to selected collaborators instead of all.
- Many small bug fixes and enhancements

What's going to be next:
- Support conditional formatting (only in Excel)
- Support named ranges (only in Excel)
- Show who is currently editing
- Performance improvement in the browser editor
- Xcellery for the intranet.
- Xcellery for .... (will tell you more next time)

What others say about Xcellery

2006-08-12T17:48:00.000-07:00

Hi,

It's great to see that people started to write about Xcellery. The nicest of all is that people actually realize that Xcellery is quite different compared to other online spreadsheets. Our biggest concern was always to be blindly compared with Google, iRows, NumSum, Zoho etc. without them seeing our big advantage. I guess we did a good job in telling:
"Xcellery doesn't try to replace Excel but extend it!"

Here the highlights...

News from the land of Xcellery

2006-07-20T02:02:00.000-07:00

Hi,

It's been almost a month and we just uploaded a new version of www.xcellery.com. We primarily focused on maintanance and added a few functional changes. E.g. when you share a workbook with somebody, the invitation email now contains the Excel file as attachment and not just the link anymore.

Further we spent a lot of time doing business related stuff. We are working on some interesting deals and will soon be able to talk about it.

For the next release we plan on adding read/write access and also add real-time update functionality. E.g. we will show inside Excel or the browser editor who else is also editing the file. This way you will never get surprised by the conflict resolution dialog or some other sudden changes happening in the spreadsheet.

Stay tuned and let us know what you think!

Reto
www.xcellery.com

Import feature is ready

2006-06-21T12:04:00.000-07:00

It's been 2 weeks and we are back with some exciting new stuff in Xcellery. Our user base is growing daily and people really start enjoying all the great advantages which Xcellery adds to Microsoft® Excel.

What's new?
Import: Since Xcellery tightly integrates with Excel we added a new button on the Xcellery toolbar in Excel. Click on Import, select an existing Excel file and voila - leave the rest up to us. The import feature will not delete any previous data. In case a worksheet already exists it simply adds a new version to it.

Preference: We added 2 radio buttons on the My Documents page where you can set a preference of how to open a workbook on a mouse double click. Your preference will be remembered and can be changed at any time.

Others: We made many many small improvements in functionality and performance.

What's next?
Although our main focus is the online integration in Excel we will further work on browser editor improvements like support of cell merge, number formatting and loading performance for larger spreadsheets. In Excel itself we will start working on online chart support.

Go and check it out @ www.xcellery.com

Tough competition - Xcellery remains unique

2006-06-06T08:44:00.000-07:00

Today Google test launched a new service called Google Spreadsheets. As usual Google does a great job with anything they release. What does Google's launch mean for Xcellery? Although Google may take away the breath of many online spreadsheet providers - Xcellery still remains unique. Xcellery's believe is not to replace Excel but extend it. That' s why we have our primary focus on building online capability into the Excel itself. We also provide the browser editor but more as an alternative to review and publish your spreadsheets online. We will stay on course and keep on improving Xcellery, the best online spreadsheet in the market.

Go and try it @ www.xcellery.com

Xcellery handles real world spreadsheets.

2006-05-22T00:22:00.000-07:00

A friends company is interested in using Xcellery for their sales team. For test purposes we got one of their workbook's which contains several worksheets and makes strong use of cell merges. Out of curiosity I imported the workbook into all the well known online spreadsheets. None of them was able to handle it. Many already failed during import or became very slow while editing.
Using Xcellery we created a new workbook and opened it using "Edit in Excel". Then we simply copy/pasted sheet by sheet from one Excel file to the other. Everything worked smooth. This test showed that browser-based-only spreadsheets aren't ready for the real world yet. Xcellery using Excel on the other hand is.

Stay tuned, Xcellery import is coming soon.

Try Xcellery using Demo User

2006-05-19T17:16:00.000-07:00

It's been 2 weeks since we succesfully launched www.xcellery.com. The website has been working very smooth and stable. Many people registered with Xcellery and gave us some really good and constructive feedback. We really appreciate that and do everything possible to enhance and build Xcellery the way you would like to have it.

The main purpose of this release was to improve the site so that guest users can better explore Xcellery. We added a Demo User sign in which let's you try the web site without having to register first. Further it wasn't very obvious to many people that Xcellery is actually very different to other online spreadsheet in providing the "Edit in Excel" functionality. We introduced a "New" icon at places where we want to get more user attention. Last but not least we enhanced and fixed few little things in different areas of the web site and Excel spreadsheet.

In the next 2 weeks we will work on an upload feature which lets you import existing Microsoft® Excel and Open Office Calc files into Xcellery. This will make it very easy to get started with Xcellery.

Thanks for using www.xcellery.com and stay tuned to hear more exiting news coming soon.

Xcellery goes live!

2006-05-04T00:00:00.000-07:00

Collaborall is proud to go live with a revolutionary new online spreadsheet service called Xcellery.

Xcellery lets you share and edit spreadsheets online in your Microsoft® Excel or in our browser - based Xcellery editor. Either way, Xcellery automatically consolidates changes from your collaborators for you. Never lose track over who changed what. We track every change. At any time, you can revert back to a previous revision.

Go and check it out. http://www.xcellery.com