The world’s most advanced cloud-based document collaboration platform: SavvyDox

‘Transforming document collaboration from a serial process into an intelligent interaction with documents.’

SavvyDox is a cloud based solution providing secure document distribution and collaboration. Beyond just sharing documents for review, SavvyDox manages the process involved in changing the contents inside the documents. It provides measurable productivity benefits and risk reduction for departmental and Enterprise solutions running on a public or private cloud. Founded in 2011 by David G. Thomson, SavvyDox is a privately held company based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

During Thomson’s consulting with worldwide CEOs, he found that the CEOs shared a common business problem – in their distributed environments, communications with field personnel were fraught with problems. Specifically, version control of documents created issues on a daily basis, there was no tool available that would help manage and control the modification of the content of documents being circulated for review, and the Headquarters’ teams were not even sure if the documents were being read by field personnel. Thomson created SavvyDox to address those key problems and decided to use the template from his book “Blueprint to a Billion” to guide its growth.  

In Conversation with the Key Executive 

What differentiates SavvyDox from other cloud-based document collaboration platforms?

SavvyDox provides simple and intuitive document collaboration that maps to the benefits achieved in a face to face meeting. SavvyDox provides a near real time parallel review process with everyone being able to see everyone else’s suggested changes and comment on others suggested changes with threaded comments. That ensures that the author of the document sees all the suggested changes, not just the last one.  

On critical business and policy documents, it is important for the author of the document to control the content. Using SavvyDox, reviewers provide suggested changes while the author of the document is the only person who can change the content. In addition, SavvyDox does not allow a document to be copied or forwarded, so the author controls the distribution and determines who can read the document, helping eliminate leaks of important documents. SavvyDox’ unique approach to tracking changes provides clean documents that highlight author changes eliminating the multi-colors and cross outs from Word Track Changes that make documents almost unreadable. 

To reduce review time, SavvyDox provides page thumbnails that identify which pages of a multi-page document have changed. To further improve productivity, SavvyDox can compare ANY two versions of a document with one mouse click.  SavvyDox eliminates version control problems by ensuring that everyone always has the current copy of a document on their device. SavvyDox allows reviewers to file documents on their device wherever they wish and syncs them back to the master copy eliminating the confusion of trying to find a document in a complicated file/folder structure. That capability allows the end user to always find the document within 3 mouse clicks. 

What are the customer benefits of SavvyDox?

SavvyDox provides measurable productivity improvements as evidenced at the first customer site that experienced a 100% ROI in the first month. The security within the system eliminates leaks of confidential information, document quality is improved as a result of the parallel review process and that same process helps improve the turnaround on document completion. In addition to providing a dashboard to track the status of all documents distributed by the author, SavvyDox provides a full audit trail of who has read which pages of a document, who has suggested changes, and who has approved changes. 

How do you and your company contribute to the global IT platform and society at large?

SavvyDox has a very disruptive approach to a common problem of document control. We come at it from a different direction than most companies and have had some very positive customer feedback on our approach. Everything in today’s business environment from processes to quality to marketing plans to sales plans to financial results are documented. Documents help businesses to become repeatable and consistent. 

The way that people collaborate on documents today is a relic to the past and SavvyDox provides the opportunity to improve document management and control with a simple, intuitive, and easy to use application. We believe that improving the method which documents are handled will drastically impact everyone from the working level administrative team members all the way to the executive suite.

Meet the SavvyDox Mavericks 

David G. Thomson, Founder: SavvyDox  was  founded  in 2011 by David G. Thomson. Thomson held executive level positions at Nortel, Sprint, HP, and McKinsey. While at McKinsey, Thomson gathered a vast amount of data on businesses that had grown to $1 Billion in sales and wrote two books summarizing his findings – Blueprint to a Billion and Mastering the Seven Essentials. Both made New York Times best seller lists sparking consulting engagements with CEO’s worldwide regarding growing their business.  

Tragically, Thomson passed away from a heart attack at age 58 in August 2012. 

Hans Downer, CEO: Hans joined SavvyDox in September 2012 as the new CEO after successful executive roles at Nortel, Entrust, Mxi Technologies, March Networks, and two startups. He brought broad experience in sales, marketing, professional services, and post-sales support to SavvyDox.  

"SavvyDox is an elegant solution for anyone requiring always-on, always up-to-date, mobile access to revised document details."