Thank you to all the customers and friends who helped us come up with a new and improved identity! Next week we intend to change our name - but not our service! OfficeDrop customers can expect the same great service - plus some nifty new logos and cool new features. You will still be able to reach us by phone at 888-674-6493 or by our online chat feature, or by our support email or help features. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions. And thanks again to all of you who helped us brainstorm, evaluate, and create our new name. We hope you love it!
Also, if you are curious, we will be posting more on the reasons we are making the name change and our process for coming up with a new name, which involved employee brainstorming, recall tests, customer consultation, a large customer survey (and a healthy dose of feedback from our spouses.)
The Wall Street Journal recently reviewed a couple of pieces of hardware that you could use to help you manage your paper in your home office. Katherine Boehret looked at the PlanOn System Solutions Inc.’s $300 PrintStik PS905ME (a printer) and the ScanSnap S1300 (a scanner). While she liked the small size of each, she did not love either device. The small printer sounds like it comes with a number of drawbacks, including using a funny + expensive thermal paper and printing on paper that comes in a single, long roll.
She appreciated the ScanSnap’s software because it is very easy to use and install. Katherine’s main complaint on the ScanSnap is that it is probably not good at handling old or fragile documents. I’d agree with this, but point out that even OfficeDrop’s expensive industrial scanners are not meant for fragile paper. Instead, we flatbed these materials - as should you. I’ve got an older ScanSnap on my desk, and while it does not provide the same level of beautiful scans as our multi-thousand dollar scanners, it does a great job for the size and price. We continue to recommend ScanSnaps to our customers who want to do their own scanning.
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.
Friday’s TV show “Shark Tank” featured another cool company using the USPS to help it grow. Just as OfficeDrop relies on the USPS to service our customers, SENDaBALL delivers its products directly to customers with the help of the Postal Service.
SENDaBALL pretty does exactly what the name says - they deliver personalized, inflated balls! The cool thing is that the balls arrive via postal mail totally inflated and ready to be played with.
SENDaBALL highlights a really cool aspect of USPS - they will deliver pretty much anything you can stick a stamp on.
The founders did a great job explaining their product (you can see the Shark Tank video on Hulu here.)
A few take-aways from their pitch on the show:
Practicing the pitch is very important - keep it simple and funny.
Based on my limited exposure to the show (1 episode), looks like all consumer ideas - makes sense; it probably isn’t a good idea to go on with other business focused ideas.
The judges are under the gun to make a snap decision to invest - at times they come out looking like fools.
Pitchers should not expose all their cards - the sharks will use it to their advantage to get the best deal.
Even if the idea does not get money, the exposure is huge. I could not get on SENDaBALL site after the show aired. The site was too busy. The free PR is worth a ton!
We have just published a new help video on how to use folders in OfficeDrop’s document management system. We think you’ll find that folders, plus our label and search features, provide a great way to keep your information and paper organized and quickly accessible!
Using Folders
The following list of steps will explain how to use folders:
From your OfficeDrop home page, you’ll notice a folder list on the left side of the interface.
Clicking a folder in the list will allow you to view all of the documents in that folder. If there is a plus sign next to a folder, you can click this to reveal subset folders within the main folder.
Creating a new folder
To create a new folder, click the button labeled ‘Actions,’ located at the top of the folder list. From the drop down menu, select ‘Create’ which is noted with a plus sign.
From there you will be asked to designate the hierarchical location of the folder known as the parent, and name the new folder. Choosing the parent will allow you to determine if your new folder should be a subset of an existing folder. If you wish the folder to stand separate, select ‘Root’ as the parent.
Once you’ve named your folder, click ‘Create’ and, your new folder now appears in the folder list.
For now, your new folder will be empty.
To move documents to your folder, you can either move a single document from its individual document controls, or you can check multiple documents from the list and move all selected documents.
Moving Documents
To move a single document, find the individual document controls in the gray area underneath that document, and click ‘Move to.’
You will then select an existing folder and click ‘Move to the selected folder’ to transfer the document. The document will disappear from view and move to the selected folder.
You’ll notice you can also create a new folder from this menu.
A document can only occupy one folder at a time, so if you move a document that is already in a folder, it will be relocated to the new folder you choose, not copied.
To move multiple documents, you can check each documents check box, located at the bottom left corner of the document snippet.
From here you will click the ‘Move to’ button at the top of the document list, which will control all selected documents. Follow the same protocol as moving a single document and all checked documents will be affected.
Moved documents will disappear from view, and move to the designated folder.
It is also possible to move documents from their full document views. After you’ve opened a document, find the document controls on the right side and use the ‘Move to’ button as described previously.
You may know of About.com, a database/website of helpful articles on almost everything. About.com runs an extensive section for entrepreneurs, which is a great resource for tools, tips and stories about everything involved with entrepreneurship. Included are articles about becoming an entrepreneur, drawing customers, marketing, as well as discussions, and examples of new and upcoming businesses.
In a recent discussion, small businesses contributed to the story “How Entrepreneurs Are Using Technology to Reduce Cost & Increase Profits.” Six company reps, including one from OfficeDrop, contributed to the discussion, resulting in a valuable list of ways web and other technology can be employed to benefit your small business. Below we outline the best tips we found in the discussion along with some quotes from contributors.
Gaining customers through Internet and Social Media:
“E-mail newsletters, blog, Twitter, & Facebook have all allowed us to maximize our exposure and reach new audiences.”
Using Google Apps:
“Google Contacts allows you to share your contact list with fellow employees.”
Operating in the cloud:
“Moving your existing network to a cloud-based model is easy to do, and the cost is usually recovered within the first year.”
Using Smartphones:
“Smartphones allow us to connect with each other and valuable customer data.”
In our contribution, which you can read here, we outline the technology we use to increase productivity and maintain low costs.
One of the technologies we use is our own service, employing a OfficeDrop online account to manage bills and other important documents that need to be organized and easily accessed later. In addition, we use other cloud-based SaaS providers for things like contractor billing, email marketing, and document sharing. See our post about SaaS marketing tools for small business for more details.
We hope that the About.com’s page for entrepreneurs can be helpful to you, and that your business can benefit from some of the technology discussed.
Tax season is a big one for businesses. It means a lot of organization, a lot of tax documents, and often, a lot of questions. We’ve authored several blog posts for last year’s tax season which are still full of relevant information. To help you prepare for the upcoming tax deadlines and answer some commonly asked tax questions, we’ve provided two of our most helpful tax-related blog posts to-date.
With so many tax documents piling up year to year, you may be wondering if it’s OK to throw some of these away. In truth, the answer depends on which tax documents you’re talking about. In this blog post, we outline the general rules of how long different tax documents should be saved.
An IRS audit can be a scary thing - especially when you don’t know if you’re prepared. Regain your confidence by studying this post which tells you exactly what you’ll need to fly through an audit.
Hopefully we’ve answered some questions and put some minds at ease. OfficeDrop wishes you the best of luck this tax season.
OfficeDrop provides you with a long list of security features, but when it comes to your online account, your information can only be as secure as your account password. Hackers can take advantage of short or simple passwords, leaving many at risk. Essentially “12345″ is not going to cut it. We want your password strength to be high, so that you won’t give any hackers the satisfaction.
Fortunately there are several ways to make sure your password is bombproof. Imperva has provided a complete guide to password strengths and pitfalls here. We thought this article was very informative, and have outlined their main points to make sure your password is un-hackable, and that your documents stay secure.
4 Tips For Password Strength
1. Your password should be at least 8 characters long.
2. Your Password should contain a mix of numbers, upper case letters, lower case letter, and special characters (!@#$%).
3. Your password should not be a name, part of your email address, or any single word in the dictionary. This will protect you from password guessing and “dictionary attacks.”
4. It is recommended that your password is a shortened character representation of a sentence. For example, the phrase “safe from attack” could become the password “s8feFRM@ack.”
OfficeDrop is happy to announce the release of another tutorial video, which demonstrates how to use your OfficeDrop account to share documents online with friends and co-workers. Sharing digital documents across your business is a great way to expedite projects and increase productivity.
Sharing documents online with OfficeDrop is simple and secure
Just select the document or folder you wish to share, and enter email addresses to which a secure link will be sent. You are always in control of your share documents with features like share duration, download access and other security features.
*See the tutorial video below for more in-depth descriptions and examples.
In order to share a single document, move to the document’s options under the document snippet and click the ‘More’ button.
From the dropdown menu, select ‘Share’ and you will be required to fill out sharing options.
Choose Security Options
First specify whether the share is public or private. Public shares can be accessed by anyone with the link you have sent, while a private share limits sharing to a specific email address.
Choose whether to grant printing or download access and whether annotations will be visible.
Designate emails of those you wish to share with.
Edit share duration to choose how long the document is shared.
Personalize the message sent to recipients.
Once finished, hit send and your document will be shared.
Note that under the document snippet, your current active share is shown, along with previous shares of that document.
You can view all of your shared documents from the shared items list located left of the interface, under the labels list.
Also note that OfficeDrop grants you the option of expiring a share so that you always have control of your share durations.
Sharing Folders Online
To share a folder, first click the folder you want to share and select ‘Share’ from the ‘Actions’ menu. You can also access the share button from an individual folder’s options by clicking the arrow to the left of a folder name.
Fill out the sharing form and your folder will be shared.
We hope this tutorial has been helpful. Please leave a comment or contact us with any questions or comments.
OfficeDrop’s Document Management and Document Scanning Service Blog
OfficeDrop, formerly Pixily, helps small businesses and home offices go paperless and manage their paper and digital documents online. OfficeDrop provides document scanning services and an award-winning online document management system. In this blog, we’ll discuss cool ways customers are using our service to tame their paper problem and get organized. We hope to share tips and tricks we are learning as we scan, image and digitize documents for our clients. We’ll also highlight new features in our document management system, let you know what the press is saying about us and keep you up to speed with the goings-on at OfficeDrop!
