Anand Rajaram | Document Management Blog

Author's Posts

Celebrating Happy Customers

Monday, October 4th, 2010

Oct 4 -8, 2010 is Customer Service Week. We take a lot of pride in the way we serve our customers, be it empowering employees to do whatever it takes to delight the customer or the founders and the management team actively participating in our phone and chat support. And, we strongly believe that the road to happy customers goes through happy employees. So this week, we take a moment to celebrate our customer service team, the friendly voices that you hear when you call us and the helpful person on the other side of the Chat. Sunshine & Smiles

We aspire each day for quick responses to your emails, prompt and helpful answers on phone and chat, getting your documents processed on time, and helping you with your questions about the system or getting the most out of your OfficeDrop experience. We love to hear from you.

Please keep your feedback coming. In addition to the Live Chat, our toll free number (888-674-6493) and Email support, this past week we have added another easy way for you to let us know what you think. Upon logout, you will see a big, bold feedback form that you can use to let us know about your experience. and every piece of feedback is important, especially the ones that point out the areas where we need to improve. We have a lot of things planned, and your feedback helps us prioritize and gets us to work on the important ones.

A BIG thank you to you, our customers, and the employees who strive hard to keep you happy.

Happy Customer Service week!

(Pic courtesy of nanagyei @ flickr)

New from OfficeDrop

ScanDrop scanning software is OfficeDrop’s newest product and makes it easy to scan paper directly into popular cloud services. Scan to Google Docs, scan to Evernote, Scan to Dropbox, scan to OfficeDrop, soon scan to gmail, scan to local disk. ScanDrop offers powerful PDF tools like preview, rotate, page reorder, delete, crop and more. When scanning to the cloud, add metadata like tags, labels, notebooks, and folders/collections.

Posted in Customer Satisfaction | No Comments »

A Few Touchups for the New Year

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Over the past month or so, we have introduced a few “touch-ups” to the OfficeDrop Application. These are by no-means ground breaking features, but more along the lines of “usability enhancements” and “I can’t believe it wasn’t already there”.

Here are a few of the noteworthy ones:

Context-Menus for Folders and Labels

Folders Menu Screenshot

Folder context menu screenshot

Labels Menu Screenshot

label-context-menu2

Now you have a “right-click” for each individual folder and label. Just click the arrow to the left of the folder or label name and you are given a list of options specific to that classification.

Drag and Drop Feature

You can now Drag and Drop documents to both folders or labels. To do this, just click and drag document snippets to either a folder or label in the folder or label menu. Dragging to a folder will move that document from any folder it was in previously, to the new folder. Dragging to a label will simply add that label to the list of already applied labels.

Posted in Document Management, Product Announcements, Product Features, Product Updates | No Comments »

Know Thy User – How Google Maps India got it right

Sunday, December 27th, 2009

Google Maps recently announced an updated version of Google Maps India. Reading on how they went about fixing the problems with Google Maps India brings me back fond memories of how we went about designing OfficeDrop’s user interface.

As noted in earlier blog posts, we take a lot of care about usability at OfficeDrop. Back in the early days of the company, we visited people’s homes to figure out how they handled paper, how they looked for information in paper (quick flipping through, with eyes gazing at prominent landmarks such as logos, headings etc,.) and what kind of organization and retrieval schemes were in play. We conducted dozens of interviews and tried to precisely understand how people perceive paper in their information life.

All this research, tons of experimentation and gallons of caffeine resulted in our “Snippet view”. The thumbnail (to the left) gives a telescopic/big-picture view of the page, and the snippet (to the right) anchors our vision to familiar logos, and patterns (such as Billing Date and Account number) mimicking what we do when we flip through stacks of paper. The labels and other metadata (below) provide the necessary context. All in all, they are discrete nuggets of information in perfect harmony. Our users love it. The same view extends very well during search and adds rich context to the search terms.

Snippet View Displaying Search results with visual context

So, as simple as it sounds, know thy user. It will help your product and they will love you for it. I am glad we got it right the first time.

Posted in Customer Satisfaction, Document Management, Market Research | 1 Comment »

Pixily @ Xconomy Cloud3 Forum and Unpanel

Monday, December 7th, 2009

I am very excited to be a part of the Xconomy Cloud 3 Forum this Thursday (Dec 10). I will be speaking about our experiences with the Cloud and subsequently be a part of the Unpanel. I am especially excited about the “Un”panel, inspired by un-conferences. The unpanel will start with a general theme: the practical realities of cloud computing, with an emphasis on the various types of cloud services available today, who’s offering them, how to use them in your business, and maybe how to grow your own cloud services company. But the specific questions will be up to the audience.

I have just put the finishing touches to my talk. I will be sharing our experiences with the Cloud, and specifically the Amazon Web Services, and provide details on how the cloud helps us keep our fixed costs low, scale easily and most importantly, pass on those cost savings to our customers. I have also taken out the crystal ball and ventured into some predictions for the future and identified a few key learnings that anyone new to cloud computing can take advantage of.

There are only a few seats remaining, so Register now to attend what promises to be a great day of learning, sharing and networking. See you there.

Posted in Events, Pixily | No Comments »

Move to Folders and Apply label via email – The power of information in its context

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

OfficeDrop’s document management service is all about information. We provide very easy ways to capture information (including paper documents), and even easier ways to access it and act on it. Often times, there is maximum context associated with the information when you are actively dealing with it the first time and then it is the context that helps us retrieve the information later on. Context is what provides the vivid details and lights up our neurons later on when we need to access that information from our memory. This is why Context is an important aspect of the Getting Things Done methodology too.

So, how does this matter to you when using OfficeDrop?

When sending emails to your OfficeDropmail email account, you can now specify the folder that you want to move the attachments (or the email itself) to and can also specify what labels you would like to apply to those documents once they are processed in to your OfficeDrop account.

Why is this powerful?

It is powerful because, at the time that you forward the information is when you exactly know how you want to organize it. You don’t have to log back into the system later on just to organize your documents. Also, if your clients, partners or vendors are sending documents to your pixily account, you can ask them to specify the folders and make it easy on yourself

How does it work?

To move the email attachments (or the actual body itself) to a folder called “Customers/Acme-Corp”, you just have to specify #Folder: Customers/Acme-Corp in the subject line. If the folder structure already exists, your documents will be moved to that folder and if not, those folders will be created for you. Similarly to apply the labels “Invoice” and “2009″ to those documents in the email, you can specify #Label: Invoice, 2009 in the email’s subject line. We accept most known variations such as #Folders, #Labels etc,.

But how do I know what folders and labels I have?

We understand it is not easy to keep track of this all the time. So we have given you a couple of easy ways to save a copy of your folder and label list. From the Folder Actions Menu and the Label Actions Menu, you can save a PDF version of your folder and label list, or you can send an email with your folder and label list.

Print Email and Copy Folder list to Clipboard

These actions are also available from the page where you configure your email via upload (https://www.pixily.com/ze/tools/email_upload )

Print or Email Folder list from The Tools Menu

This is another small, yet really useful way that we hope will help you save time in organizing documents and capturing as much context as you can provide at the time of sending emails. We hope you find it useful. Let us know what you think.

Posted in Document Management, Organization, Product Features, Product Updates | 1 Comment »

What’s in a name?

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

Turns out quite a bit, especially when it comes to documents and how we relate to it. That’s why we just added the ability to sort documents by name (alphabetically and in reverse). All snippet views, when browsing folders or labels, or when displaying search results will now have the option to sort the display by the document name.

Here is a screenshot with the sort drop down and the updated set of options. Fairly straight-forward, and hopefully addresses a nag.

Viewing documents sorted by name

Posted in Product Features | 1 Comment »

The Simplest Document Management and Scanning Service Just Became Easier to Find

Monday, September 28th, 2009

We are very excited to announce that OfficeDrop’s award-winning document management service is now available through the Intuit App Center. The Intuit App Center is powered by Intuit Inc. Through the Intuit App Center, small businesses will be able to find tested and proven third-party software applications. For a solution that was especially built with small businesses in mind, we are incredibly excited to be associated with one of the most trusted brands for small businesses.

What makes this partnership especially cool is that, OfficeDrop now integrates with Quickbooks data through the Intuit Data Services (IDS) API. For starters, when you share documents or folders from OfficeDrop, we automatically lookup the email addresses of your Customers and Vendors from Quickbooks, to make the sharing easier. Here is a screenshot that illustrates this.

Share using Quickbooks

If you are a QuickBooks user who is new to OfficeDrop, you can watch this 2 minute video to know what makes OfficeDrop the preferred document management and document scanning service for small businesses.

Posted in partnerships, Product Announcements | No Comments »

Scanning Documents to Pixily using Snow Leopard and Preview

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

Part of the many minor enhancements in Apple’s new Snow Leopard OS are the changes to the Preview Application. To quote Apple “Snow Leopard simplifies scanning by putting scanned data directly into Preview. Now you can scan, view, and correct your files and images in Preview. The scanning interface even detects the placement of images or documents on the scanner to automate the selection of regions to scan.”

I took it for a test-drive and it is fairly intuitive. I put together a 1-minute video (the quick and not too dirty kind, so pardon any jagged edges in the fonts) to show the steps involved in Scanning from Preview and sending it to your pixilymail email account. I used a HP OfficeJet for this, but the menu and clicks should be the same for pretty much any other scanner. The only item we recommend that you select a non-default is to choose 300 dpi during the scanning, so that the OCR quality is pretty good. You may use defaults for other settings and let OfficeDrop do the heavy-lifting for everything else.

Have you upgraded to Snow Leopard yet? Have you tried out this feature? Let us know what you think.

Posted in Document Scanners, Paperless | No Comments »

Introducing Folders and Filters in Pixily

Friday, August 7th, 2009

We have to admit that we initially resisted it, but true to our culture of being customer-driven, we are introducing Folders in OfficeDrop. Yep, as of today, You can pretty much do all the good stuff with folders(create, delete, rename, organize, etc,.) that you can also do in your PC or Mac.

To learn more about the new features and other UI changes, you can watch this 5-minute video or read the rest of this post with screenshots.

Folders:

Folders act much the same as how they do in our desktop computers. Clicking a folder opens the folder to display the documents in that folder. You can move folders around using drag-drop, and share folders. When you share folders, any time you add or remove documents from those shared folders, the recipients automatically see the updated version of your folder. And ofcourse, you can expire the share if you would like.

Folders and Folder actions

Restoring deleted folders from trash, and moving uploaded documents to a folder (while they are being processed) are conspicuous by their absence and we are working to fix that. Stay tuned.

Labels:

The current labels functionality largely remains the same, with one exception. All the label specific actions can now contextually performed right from the Labels display, rather than from the Organize tab.

Label Actions from the label list

Search and Filters:

Our powerful content search functionality got even more juice. After searching for a term, you can now filter the results further by viewing only those documents that belong to a folder, contain a label (or both). You can get more restrictive or less restrictive using the “Any” or “All” filters. You can keep adding folders until you narrow down or clear them all.

Search and filter using folders and labels

Ofcourse, filters work outside of search too. So, for example, you can find out all the documents that are in the “Paperless LLC” folder and have the label “2008″ in them.

UI Refresh:

We have also made some UI refreshes.

The Entire UI is more (jargon alert!!) ”AJAX”-ified. What this means is that we dont have to wait for pages to refresh, and provides for a more richer experience. For example, when I am viewing the list of all documents that are not labeled and apply a label to a list of documents, those documents are now removed from the list. This is great when you organize documents periodically by applying labels to them or moving them to folders.
The “organize” tab and the “share” tab have been replaced with the same functionality offered from the “Labels” and “Shared Items” menus.
The freed up real estate on the top has now made way to the Search bar.
Addons, Email preferences, which were all under the account page, have been separated out into a page of their own called “Tools”. (If you read into this that we are going to introduce more such tools in the coming months you would be absolutely right

UI Changes to the Navbar

This is a pretty exciting release for us and the beginning of many more things to come. How do you like the changes? What would you like added (or removed)? Let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Posted in Product Features, Product Updates | 1 Comment »

Conquering the clouds – How to position your product to win awards

Monday, July 27th, 2009

Amazon just announced their annual web services Startup Challenge. The prizes include $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in AWS credits, mentoring sessions from AWS technical experts, and AWS Premium Support Gold for one year. OfficeDrop was a finalist in in this competition last year, and it helped us get some of our initial traction and press. We definitely recommend that other startups apply for this year’s competition. OfficeDrop has also had a fair amount of luck winning/making it to the finals in several other cloud computing awards, including winning MITX’s 2009 Cloud Computing Award and being announced as a winner of the 2009 AlwaysOn Global 250 in the category of cloud computing.

We are very excited to have been so successful in these competitions, and thought it might make sense to share some of our game plan for entering these competitions. Here are the steps we take when approching a competition that might be a good fit for OfficeDrop:

1) Research the award.

a) Understand the awards’s mission statement.

b) Who are the judges? What are their backgrounds? Media-types? VCs? Technologists?

c) Who were the past winners of the award? Do you see your company standing on the stage with them?

2) Develop a clear positioning statement on how and why your company is right for this award. Come up with 3 to 5 sentences. Combine the core mission of your company with the angle that the award judgement panel will eat up.

3) Ask questions. For many competitions, the coordinators are very helpful and want to try to encourage cool startups to participate.

a) Develop a dialog with the person organizing the competition. Organizing the event is probably both fun and stressful. Keep your interaction enjoyable and don’t over-do it.

b) Always thank the person once you’ve submitted your application.

4) Have a demo account for the judges. Ensure that the way you’ve set up the demo reinforces your positioning statement and play well to the award judges.

5) Use customer testimonials/case studies that reinforce your positioning. Judges like hearing about users who are having success with your service. Be specific. Judges like concrete data and metrics. If your product / solution saves time or money (whose doesn’t), don’t just state it. Quantify it.

6) Set up a timeline for completing the application.

a) Positioning statement – 3 weeks prior to the deadline

b) First draft – 2 weeks prior; get comments from the rest of the team/advisors

c) Final draft – 1 week prior; this draft should include all comments/revisions. Yes, this should include those painful edits needed to stay under the word limits.

d) Final proof read – Couple of days before the application is due. Don’t look a the document for a few days, and then read it end to end. Look for a logical flow/structure and make sure the application fits the positioning statement.

7) If the submission also includes a presentation, practice, practice and practice. Know thy audience. It is really important to have a crisp presentation that stays on message. Make sure you present why you are the most eligible to win the award. This is involved enough, that it is worth an entire blog post (or a book) by itself. I’ll do a follow-up blog post on the art of making the sell, later on.

This process has worked out pretty well for us, but does require real commitment. However, given the press that we’ve received and the positive attention and feedback we’ve gotten from customers after we’ve won these awards we feel that the work was worth it! Here’s to your chances in the next competition that you enter!! Good Luck!

Posted in Awards, Entrepreneurship, Pixily, Small Business | 1 Comment »