We’re always listening to our customers to hear what kind of features and services are important to them. Recently we’ve noticed a large number of people starting to use their Pogoplugs for professional and business purposes, such as collaborative document editing and distributing huge files (to clients, colleagues, etc). From talking to some of you directly, we’ve come to learn that the product is becoming really useful for a lot of small businesses who create and share large documents, such as ad/creative agencies, photo professionals (esp wedding photographers), videographers, imaging facilities, etc. As a result, we’re excited to introduce two new features to help these professionals with their workflow (and we have a hunch regular consumers are going to like them too!).

View Any Doc Within My.Pogoplug.Com
In the current version of Pogoplug, when you want to view or edit a document, it opens your local application (MS Office, Acrobat, etc) to handle the work. A lot of our users wanted the ability to view their documents directly within their Pogoplug environment. So we’re happy to announce that we have full compatibility with many of the popular document formats! This is a great feature, and we really think it’ll help a lot of people who need to review docs but want to get through them as fast as possible. Supported formats include:

Microsoft Word (Office 95 and newer) – .doc, .docx
Microsoft Excel (Office 95 and newer) – .xls, .xlsx, xls5, xls95
Microsoft PowerPoint (Office 97 and newer) – .ppt, .pptx
Open Office Documents (.stw, .sxw)
Open Office Drawings (.sxd, .std,.odg)
Open Office Presentations (.sti,.sxi)
Open Office Spreadsheet (.stc,.sxc)
PDF
CSV
TXT
XML
RTF

Email Files to your Pogoplug
Since email is the number one way people communicate in business, and the top use of all computers, AND the easiest way for people to get files from place to place, AND the most portable way to be in digital communication, we wanted to make email an easy part of getting files to a Pogoplug. And it is easy! All users have to do is email “upload@mypogoplug.com” with a file attachment (or multiple files), and they will automatically get sent straight to that user’s Pogoplug! The Pogoplug.com service already authenticates users by email address, so no special registration, plugin, download, or other step is needed to get going. We think this is a fantastic way for business users to keep an always-accessible document archive and a fun way for consumers to share photos and videos to their family directly from mobile devices.

The updates will automatically be rolling out to Pogoplug users later today, without requiring anyone to install or download or configure any new settings. We’re really excited about these two new features, and always listening on our community to hear what else you may want. Feel free to join the conversation there, or engage with us on twitter and let us know what you think!