Doocuments lets you share your documents securely and provides you with reader analytics

Doocuments is a handy online utility that makes sending VIP documents more secure, disallows printing certain pages or the whole document, prevents different recipients from viewing certain pages, sets an expiration date for the document, secures documents with passwords and watermarks, and can even provide viewer analytics.

You can get started with your first document without having to sign up, however, to take advantage of what this service has to offer you will be sent an activation email that will enable you to register to use the free version.

You can upload documents at the ‘publish’ tab, where can schedule when to publish the document, choose to allow/disallow certain operations, and enable notifications on printing, viewing, forwarding or downloading. You can even add an expiry date to your publication. You can even make the service notify you when the document is downloaded or printed if allowed.

Note that by default, when you upload the document, it is set to prevent everything including printing, forwarding, etc., so you will need to actively allow these if you want them.

To get complete information and edit the settings, click on the document and select modify properties. From there, you can add protection to your documents or watermark them and make sure that it is safe to share. The recipient will receive an email with the link to view the document.

Free vs. Paid plans

The FREE personal version offers a max unloadable document size of 3 megs, 20 reads per doc, and  5 GB total storage. Which is not bad. What may be limiting, however, is that each document can have up to a maximum of 5 recipients only, which for many people will be a deal breaker. The paid versions offer extra storage size, more number of recipients, more users, more reads per documents, and API access. Note that there is a free enterprise version with support to up to 100 users. The is 5€/month/user.

In Conclusion

One thing that I really like about the service is that you don’t have to download third party applications to protect/watermark, hide specific pages, password protect your documents, and you don’t have to alter the original document itself to use these features. Even though you can encrypt or watermark documents with Microsoft Word or other document creation tools, Doocuments is just more convenient and professional, keeps you in control at all times, and enables you to set different permissions and abilities for different recipients/readers (e.g. you might want your boss to be able to download and edit, but not an outside consultant or a customer, etc.)

One feature I do like is that Doocuments can integrate with Dropbox and Box, to publish documents that exist there with a single click.

The other unique service that it provides is analytics: Doocuments can notify you whenever the document is accessed or downloaded by the recipient. This way you can easily track your documents and make sure that they have been received and read, etc.

As mentioned above, each document is limited to 5 recipients in the free version, which can be a significant handicap that you have to consider before investing your time with this service. Aside from that, Doocuments is an excellent, polished service that can be very useful.

Check out Doocuments.