[February 04, 2016]

Hightail Expands Creative Collaboration Solution with Visual Project Management

Today, Hightail® extended its innovative Spaces™ feature, delivering a new set of visual project management capabilities that include task assignment, approvals, versioning, and project dashboards. Built specifically for visual projects and creative teams - marketing departments, design teams, ad agencies, video production studios, web design firms, etc. - these new features unify the entire creative process, from the first shared asset, through the iterative collaboration process to final approval, streamlining team communication and improving efficiency.

"The act of storing a file in the cloud has rapidly become commoditized by large companies like Google and Microsoft giving it away for free, which is why you see simple cloud storage companies like Dropbox and Box (News - Alert) losing 50% of their market value," said Ranjith Kumaran, co-founder and CEO of Hightail. "Hightail's core customers have always been creative professionals in creative industries, so we've naturally focused all of our efforts on super-serving that market by enabling the entire creative process. With the new features we're delivering this week, creative teams can now use Hightail not only to share and collaborate on their files, but manage the entire lifecycle of their visual projects, from concept to completion."

Until now, project managers or de facto leaders of creative teams have had to cobble together and manage disparate tools and processes to keep their teams productive. Unfortunately, managing even a single project through this maze of tools is cumbersome and time consuming. With this set of new visual project management features, Hightail offers a comprehensive system for marketing and creative teams, supporting them at every turn as they navigate through the creative collaboration process. These new features let creative teams:

• Control permissions: A Space owner can assign permissions, including Edit, Appove, Download and Comment, or Comment Only, for each person on the project.
• Manage approvals: Ability to identify specific files or groups of assets that need approval, and visually see who has approved specific versions, including final approval.
• Assign and manage tasks: Users can assign tasks to team members with a simple @mention. Tasks can also be opened as "Needs Follow Up" or marked complete.
• Drill into project analytics: Project owners can now monitor the activity and overall health of their projects by viewing total number of comments, downloads, views and versions. A Space Health score is automatically calculated for each project by Hightail's proprietary algorithm, based on activity, engagement, recency and other factors.
• Keep track of new versions: Intuitive version control allows teams to go back to previous versions to see what comments were made and edits incorporated.
• View project Dashboard: An information-rich dashboard helps managers quickly view which assignments and tasks are on track, and which ones require their attention.

In addition to these visual project management capabilities, there are several other new features in Hightail's latest release, including:

• The ability to upload files directly from Google (News - Alert) Drive and Microsoft OneDrive
• An update to the email Untangler™ feature that, in addition to stripping attachments from an email, will automatically share the files with contacts on the email thread by simply forwarding the email to [email protected].
• A new audio commenting feature that enables contextual, time-stamped commenting on audio files in addition to video and image files.

About Hightail:

Hightail addresses the problems of creative collaboration and visual project management between distributed teams of creative professionals and has been an innovator in the cloud since before the term was even coined. Originally YouSendIt, Hightail created a simple way to send files that were too large for email, and has since grown to evolve the cloud into a virtual workspace that enables seamless collaboration on visual projects from concept to completion. Based in Campbell, CA (News - Alert), Hightail employs approximately 100 people and serves more than 50 million users worldwide, including professionals at 98 percent of the Fortune 500. Learn more at www.hightail.com.

© 2016 Hightail, Inc. All rights reserved. Hightail, the Hightail logo, Spaces and Untangler are trademarks of Hightail. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160204005260/en/

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