Archive for the ‘Customer Satisfaction’ Category

Prasad on Fast Company – Innovating in a Crowded Space

Friday, January 13th, 2012

Prasad has another great post on Fast Company – this time on adapting in a competitive, crowded & commoditized market. It’s called “In the Commoditization of Everything, Adaptation Will Win.

He draws on OfficeDrop’s experience in the crowded cloud storage space and talks about how we are managing to grow despite the competition (one of our solutions includes our OEM cloud storage program.) The key point he makes: “Responsiveness to change is the number one advantage startups have over larger incumbents.”

Check out the piece!

 

How I Manage It: Scott Orn: VC & Social Impact Co-Founder

Wednesday, January 4th, 2012
scott orn

Scott Orn

He’s Principal at venture capital firm Lighthouse Capital by day. Co-founder of the social impact organization Ben’s Friends by night. How does Scott Orn manage it all?

Well, OfficeDrop can’t take all the credit for Scott’s rockstar status, but we can take partial credit for his ultra-organized workflow.

“Juggling Ben’s Friends around our day jobs is a huge challenge, but keeping paper documents stored in the cloud where they can be easily searched and shared with others is an important part of staying organized,” said Scott.

Here are a few examples of how he uses OfficeDrop.

VCs travel. A lot. Scott likes using OfficeDrop’s iPhone app while he’s on the road to help manage his expenses. OfficeDrop for iPhone turns your phone’s camera into a scanner to the cloud. You can capture documents and tag, file and search them within OfficeDrop’s cloud filing cabinet.

“It’s really simple to take a photo of the receipts I accumulate on a business trip and file them directly into my expenses folder for the month,” said Scott. “I can share the folder with anyone who needs access to it, like our finance and administration teams. It saves a lot of time at the end of the month when I scrambling to get expenses filed and I never have to worry about expenses falling through the cracks and not getting reimbursed.”

And, remember, this VC also moonlights as a social impact leader. He’s the co-founder of Ben’s Friends, an organization that builds communities for patients that have rare diseases.

“Many people with rare diseases don’t have a network of folks who understand exactly what they’re going through,” said Scott. “We started Ben’s Friends to serve people who have no other options. It’s amazing how much love and support people get through our communities. It’s a life changing group to be a part of – for me and the patients. ”

Scott processes the hundreds of donations Ben’s Friends receives throughout the year, along with getting donors the appropriate receipts and perks. Donors are constantly mailing checks – which is a good thing! – but managing it all can be overwhelming.

“Since our group is a lean, 100 percent volunteer-run organization, it’s critical we handle the donations as they come in,” said Scott. “I can’t tell you how important it’s been for me to just search my OfficeDrop account on my iPad so I can find out things like how many donations came in during the month of November, who sent in the donations and what perks we need to send them. These are the kinds of things you don’t remember off the top of your head, but can be crucial when you need a quick answer.”

Cheers, Scott! We’re proud to have you among the OfficeDrop elite! To learn more about Scott’s network of patient support groups, Ben’s Friends, visit: www.bensfriends.org.

OfficeDrop iPad App Review

Wednesday, November 9th, 2011

Brooks, the document scanning and going paperless expert over at DocumentSnap, recently reviewed OfficeDrop’s iPad app. He gave the app a solid run through, pointed out a few items he’d like improved and did a great job taking screenshots of the various OfficeDrop iPad app features in action. You can read the review, called “Exploring the OfficeDrop iPad App” here.

OfficeDrop iPad App Review Highlights

The review starts off by talking about how you get your documents into the iPad app – and he mentions not only the scanning feature, but also using advanced features like sending and opening email attachments in the app and more. Finally, he gets into the search and organizing features that have made OfficeDrop popular.

The Cloud Makes All Services Frenemies

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

An important business philosophy that we have here at OfficeDrop is the concept of “Frenemies” – we will work with other services that would historically have been considered competition if it makes sense for our customers. It means that we value our customers’ workflow and actively look to integrate our cloud filing system with other online, cloud and SaaS services that our customers are using. Our customers are small businesses who want to move to a “digital office” and away from having their different work processes silo’ed into particular, proprietary applications.

What’s a Frenemy (or Frienemy, depending on how you spell it)?

We believe that the cloud has changed the way software will be used. Old, desktop software that wrote special, unique and proprietary files and that trapped your data are out. Remember when a file could only be opened by the program that created it? Well, in the cloud all the smart providers have open APIs, which means your data can now be pushed (securely, of course!) from one application to another – making it easier for you to get your work done. This means that our service may have to work with other online storage companies, or companies that have overlapping features. Should we be competing with these companies and avoid integrating with them?

No.

We can only survive if our clients WANT to use our service. They can get their data out at any time, so we need to offer the best paper-focused, searchable storage service we can – and let customers use other best in class services in conjunction with ours – like our FreshBooks document management integration. We’ve got an open API, and if someone who might be close in features wants to connect with our service they are very much able to create a tight integration with the OfficeDrop service.

OfficeDrop Articles on the Frenemy Concept

Prasad wrote about how competing in the cloud is making companies frenemies in TechCrunch. Today he penned one on “Building a Business Around Frienemies” for FastCompany.

Frienemies

iPad App: Ask and You Shall Receive!

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

A few months back, we wrote in TechCrunch about how we’re frienemies with a lot of cloud services companies, because they make our apps more useful to our customers. Sure, they could be considered competitors, but we’re all about trying to make our product more functional for users.

Updated OfficeDrop iPad App

That’s why we’re announcing an update to the OfficeDrop iPad app we relaunched just a few weeks ago. A lot of our customers do photo editing on the iPad, which a few weeks back we didn’t support. By popular demand, now we do! PhotoAppLink is an awesome new open source project that does what it’s aptly named to do: link a bunch of photo apps together. For us, this means that we can connect to other super high functioning photo editing apps effective immediately! If you’re an OfficeDrop iPad user, check out all of the apps that you can now link to your account to get a seriously excellent scanning and editing experience. Snap and GyroCropper are a few of our faves for writing notes on your pictures and cropping them, respectively. So if you don’t have it, get the OfficeDrop iPad App in iTunes now!

Another extra-requested feature was support for AirPrint, or Apple’s way to print wirelessly from your iPad. We’re like that extra creepy Genie in Big (Zoltar, in case you were wondering what his name was): your wish is our command. There are a few apps we like that help AirPrint enable any printer out there. Check out FingerPrint and Printopia, which we gave a go last week.

We also made a few cosmetic fixes to make our app look and feel more like the OfficeDrop iPhone PDF app that so many of you love. If you don’t have it, check it out — it’s free!

 

 

OfficeDrop’s iPad App Reviewed by a Customer

Monday, October 10th, 2011

You may remember when William Higgins wrote a piece on OfficeDrop’s ScanDrop software called “Scanning Documents to the Cloud with OfficeDrop.”

Well, he’s taken the time to write up a piece on our improved iPad application!

If you recall, William is a long time OfficeDrop customer who has been featured on the OfficeDrop testimonials page. He is an ECM technologist for a major bank, which means he knows a lot about managing content online.

He goes through the different organizational tools that are available on OfficeDrop iPad application, then talks about uploading and creating files using the iPad app.

Read how to manage documents in the cloud using OfficeDrop’s iPad application here!

Explain this Receipt Scan Contest!

Thursday, October 6th, 2011

In honor of the Stanley Cup Champion Boston Bruins’ season opener, OfficeDrop is holding a photo caption contest on our Facebook page!

Last season the Bruins brought home the Stanley Cup and racked up this receipt during the after party.  If you had to explain this $156,000 receipt to your boss, what would you say?

The response with the most likes at the end of the day on Friday, October 14th will win a Canon imageFORMULA P-150 Portable Document Scanner and a subscription to OfficeDrop to help you go paperless!

Entering is simple – just leave a comment on the photo on the OfficeDrop Facebook page. The comment with the most votes will win!

Click this link to enter and leave your comment:

http://ow.ly/6P7te (note that you need to log into Facebook to participate!)

Have fun, and keep it clean out there – our official rules are below.

RULES:
*NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. A purchase will not increase your chances of winning. Contest begins 12:01 AM EST 10/6/2011 and ends 11:59 PM EST 10/14/2011. Subject to Official Rules. Open to residents of the 50 United States, 18 and older. Void where prohibited.
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OfficeDrop on Makeuseof and More

Friday, September 30th, 2011

 align=OfficeDrop had  great write up on Makeuseof called “How To Use Your iPad / iPhone Camera To Scan Documents To PDF [iPhone & iPad 2]” by Steve Campbell. The article is almost a great case study and goes into detail on how the OfficeDrop iPad app can be used at a conference to scan and store paper.

Here is a quote from the article:

“Picture this. You have a really important meeting at work today, one that you’ve been up most of the night preparing for, creating documents, spreadsheets, and what not. You’ve been tasked with making digital copies of your physical notes to send to your colleagues to help prep them for this meeting, which starts in about two hours. If you were in a hurry and could only bring one thing to this meeting, what would it be?

If it was me, it would be my iPad. As for the documents I had to scan, well, that’s all been taken care of, because I used an iPad app that allowed me to take pictures of each of my documents and turn them into shiny new digital PDFs that I can organize and share with my colleagues at the click of a button. Sound convenient? Prepare to never need to keep a piece of paper ever again.”

Read How MakeUseOf uses OfficeDrop’s iPad 2 App to Scan

Here is some other recent press that we’ve gotten on our iPad app:


September 20, 2011

OfficeDrop Adds iPad Scanning Support

The application also supports taking, cropping and rotating photos that can be sent directly to OfficeDrop, useful for capturing handwritten notes, receipts and business cards on the go. Read About Using OfficeDrop’s iPad App to Scan


September 16, 2011

iPad Document Scanner: OfficeDrop

This free scanner app allows to store files up to 1GB. It is very easy to scan files to PDF using OfficeDrop. Read The Review of OfficeDrop’s iPad 2 Scanner App

How Do I Update An App from the Mac App Store

Friday, August 26th, 2011

If you’ve purchased an app in the Mac App Store then it’s easy to update the application. Apple has made it simple to update the app right from within the App Store. Here is how you do it.

Updating an App in the Mac App Store

Step 1 is to click on the Mac App Store Icon. You’ll find it on the bottom of your screen in the dock.

update mac app

Look to see if you need to update a Mac App

If you have a little red number floating above the icon then you know you have an update that is ready to install!

Step 2 is either select the downward facing arrow called “updates” or click “store” then “updates.”

update mac app store app

Click to Update the Mac App Store App

You will then be shown all the applications that have new version available.

Step 3 will have you click the  grey “update” button on the right for the app or apps that you want to update.

Yup! It’s that easy.

So, for users of OfficeDrop’s ScanDrop Mac Scanner Software, this is how you keep up to date with the latest version of our scan to the cloud software. You can start scanning to the cloud right from your Mac’s desktop with ScanDrop, which is available in the Mac App Store here. Happy scanning and updating!

OfficeDrop on BostInno

Thursday, August 11th, 2011

A post I wrote about OfficeDrop’s pricing strategy shift is now up on BostInnovation. The article is about our switch to a freemium pricing strategy, and you can read it here.

We are very excited at the growth we’ve had since July – post our pricing changes and post our new iPhone app launch. I believe that the primary driver for this success is the fact that we listened to our customers and rapidly made changes to how we sold our app after launching in the Android marketplace. One of the most important changes was the introduction of our free plan. Since then things have been great (with the exception of some scaling issues we experienced in the middle of July, which our technical team worked some long hours to address.)

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