Customer Satisfaction | Document Management and Scanning Blog

Archive for the ‘Customer Satisfaction’ Category

Wait a Minute, What is a PDF?

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

OfficeDrop turns all of your paper into text-searchable PDFs, but those new to our services may be wondering “what is a PDF?”

A PDF (Portable Document Format) is, essentially, a standardized way to represent two dimensional digital images. These images may be graphics, text documents, or a combination of the two. The PDF was created by Adobe Systems in 1993 and since them has become a standard in digital document representation. In 2008 it was published by the International Organization for Standardization as an open standard, meaning that it is now universalized and available to the public royalty-free.

The format is especially versatile because it not exclusive to any software, hardware, or operating systems - making it very easy to share. In addition, the PDF is completely extensible, which means it can be adapted to guarantee compatibility with future innovations. A PDF is typically viewed as a digital representation of a piece of paper as you would expect to see on a word processor.

Additional features of the PDF include security options like password protection, text-searchability, and interactive properties such as annotations and other edits.

Due to its heightened accessibility, security, and feature list, the PDF is the format we have chosen for your documents. We hope you now have a better appreciation of how you are viewing your documents, and why this is our favorite format here at OfficeDrop.

Posted in Customer Satisfaction, Product Features, Security | No Comments »

Pixily Moves to Cambridge

Monday, February 8th, 2010

We are pleased to announce that the OfficeDrop office has moved from our Waltham headquarters to an office in Cambridge. The new space will provide us with a lot more room to grow, as well as more space to store and process your documents. We are also excited to be closer to Boston, and closer to talented folks who can aid us with our growth and development.

The security and privacy of your documents is always foremost in our thoughts, and we assure you that our location change will in no way compromise the security of your documents during transfer or processing. In fact, the new office will allow for added security as well as space.

We will soon have new envelopes for our subscription customers with the new address. Until then, we have made arrangements with our postal facility distribution center to have all of your envelopes forwarded to the new location. (In fact, this is already happening.) As you can imagine, there is a pretty meaningful volume of our green scanvelopes through our local postal facility. We know the people there well and they are helping us make this a smooth transition. For our box customers, we have sent new PDF labels to those of you who will be impacted by our transition. We are also maintaining both the new location and the old location for a period of time, ensuring that we will get packages and scanvelopes regardless of where they are sent.

As for our service, customers will receive the same OfficeDrop service they currently enjoy, without having to change anything about how they submit or view their documents. Submission and processing will work the same way, it will just happen in a roomy new office!

We thank you for using OfficeDrop and look forward to serving you from our new Cambridge office.

For your records, our new address is:

OfficeDrop
Suite One
180 Fawcett Street
Cambridge, MA 02138-1112

As always, you can call our customer service number toll free at 888-674-6493 if you have any questions.

Posted in Customer Satisfaction, Events, Security | No Comments »

Pixily Thanks USPS

Monday, January 4th, 2010

We had a great year here at OfficeDrop, and would like to recognize the fact that much of what we do would be impossible without the hard work of the United States Postal Service. Our mail-in document scanning service makes it easier than ever to scan your paper documents to digital PDFs and we couldn’t have done it without the good people at USPS.

Thank you USPS!

Each day we see envelopes and boxes carried into our office without fail. For this we would like to thank the hard-working people at USPS. Because of USPS we now have customers in almost every state of the union (including Alaska and Hawaii!) We wouldn’t be able to provide our service at the price we offer without our reliable postal service. Even as the weather turns for the worst, the US Postal Service helps make sure our customers’ documents are delivered to us unharmed and on time.

After all,

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift and safe delivery of your paper documents for scanning with OfficeDrop.

Posted in Customer Satisfaction, Security | 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 on your iPhone - View Your Paper on Your Phone

Monday, December 21st, 2009

There’s an iPhone-optimized website for that…

So it’s not technically an app, but OfficeDrop provides an iPhone optimized mobile web page, allowing you to access OfficeDrop’s best online features anywhere you go. Access your paper on your phone! In addition to the optimized page, users can always use their iPhone to snap a camera-phone picture and email that to OfficeDrop for conversion to your online account.

From the iPhone mobile site you can search all of your documents, and browse documents by label.

To access the site, simply go to i.pixily.com on your phone’s browser, enter your login information, and away you go. Use the interface just like you would with your standard OfficeDrop online account.

Don’t forget to click the favorites (+) button at the bottom of Safari and then “Add to Home Screen,” so you can see a shortcut to your homescreen, and access your online documents as quickly as possible.

Posted in Benefits, Customer Satisfaction, Document Management, Product Features, Product Updates | No Comments »

Steps to Create the Paperless Office

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

Creating a paperless office is process, but that process can be fast and simple with a little preparation. Some well thought out planning is necessary in making a paperless environment successful in your business. At OfficeDrop, we have done a good job eliminating most paper usage (other than the hundreds of thousands of customer documents we scan every month). We would recommend the following steps if you wish to go paperless.

Going paperless - Preparation Checklist

Identify Your Goals

Why do you want to go paperless? To reduce clutter? Streamline information access? Maybe you want to make it easy to access critical business information from outside the office, or maybe you just want a place to securely backup your data. Determining what you want from a document scanning service will allow you do choose the best method of attaining it.

Review Your Current Process

Consider what happens to paper when it first enters your business. How does this differ from what happens to digital information? Determine who needs access to the data, how frequently it is touched, and whether it gets photocopied, faxed or shared with anyone inside or outside of the organization. This will allow you to determine ideal storage methods and formatting for your information.

Identify Your Files

Which pieces of paper do you want to turn digital? Compare this to your process above. What currently happens with the files you want to digitize? How will you digitize the new files of the same type that you get in the future? Answering these questions will help us understand your situation, allowing us to give you better storage recommendations and price estimates.

Implement

Now that you know which files you will turn digital, implement your program. By now you should know how you are going to deal with the back files that you currently have, and how you will handle the new ones. With the previous steps complete, talking with a OfficeDrop representative to get you started will be fast and easy.

Sustain

The best paperless systems require continuous work to maintain, because paper will continue to come into your business. Keep it under control by developing habits of promptly digitizing and storing documents as they enter your workspace. Develop a schedule for submitting your paper documents, and we will continue to keep your office organized.

OfficeDrop can help your office go paperless!

Let OfficeDrop help you go paperless - our document scanning and online document management services can help you implement and sustain your paperless office.

Posted in Benefits, Customer Satisfaction, Document Management, Organization, Paperless | 1 Comment »