Xcellery joins eXpresso

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

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

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. :-)

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Tell us what you think - Win an Office 2007

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

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!

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

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.