A new study by AIIM, which we mentioned previously, has some great charts and information about the key drivers behind businesses’ desires to go paperless. It seems that the most important reason to go paperless has nothing to do with the costs of paper, but instead is focused on the increased productivity that your employees get when going paperless.
Top Reason to Go Paperless
The biggest reason to go paperless, cited by over 50% of companies, is that improved search & sharing of business documents. In other words, it’s easier to find and share digital files vs. paper.
Increased productivity, faster response time to customers are also in the top 5 reasons. In fact, the only reason given in the top 5 for going paperless that had to do with cost savings was focused on saving physical storage space.
A new study shows that offices that reduce their use of paper can dramatically increase their ability to respond to customer needs. The study, done by AIIM, finds that “canning and capture can seriously improve customer response times — typically between 2 and 3 times faster, but in many cases 5 and 10 times faster.”
That’s a big deal!
The study also talks about how more and more companies are equipping remote workers with tablets and portable scanning devices to facilitate document scanning. This totally makes sense.
Here is an image from the study, which you can access from the link above. Basically, a large number of companies are scanning documents for archive purposes, but there are a large number of businesses that go beyond the occasional scanning and use digitization for indexing or making documents smarter or easier to find.
At OfficeDrop, we think that cloud capture can really make you more responsive to your client’s needs. In fact, we use our own online cloud storage to store important documents that we access all the time – everything from invoice to legal documents that we chat with our investors about, etc.
The newest version of ScanDrop Mac is out in the Mac App Store.
ScanDrop for Mac and the free ScanDrop Lite let any Mac user integrate scanned paper with digital screenshots to create multi-page, searchable PDFs, and with a single click share them via social networks or store them in services like Evernote, Dropbox, OfficeDrop and Google Docs.
Now, you can scan a page, grab a screenshot, store in the cloud – and socially share via Twitter – all from one place! Once the document is created, users have the option of sharing text-searchable PDFs with an unique link that’s sent directly to email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Delicious, Tumblr, and Amazon Wish List, to name a few. Popular online filing services like Google Docs, Evernote and OfficeDrop’s cloud filing cabinet are also supported, allowing users to drop OfficeDrop PDF files into their accounts and share them with anyone, anywhere.
OfficeDrop and click.to are excited to announce the newest OfficeDrop API integration – click.to to OfficeDrop!
With click.to, you’ll be able to CTRL+C (⌘+C on a Mac) any file on your desktop and send it directly into OfficeDrop’s cloud filing system. It’s super easy, really fast and a great new workflow for the power OfficeDrop users.
Get click.to to OfficeDrop for free by clicking the following link:
click.to OfficeDrop Video
Here is how the integration works:
Select any file and press CTRL+C (⌘+C on a Mac). The OfficeDrop logo will pop up; simply select it and the file is stored directly in the cloud. Users don’t have to fumble with multiple open windows, dragging and dropping, or leaving their current screen.
Special for OfficeDrop Users
OfficeDrop is the first click.to partner to have folder integration. This means that a user can choose an OfficeDrop cloud folder to upload into at the time of clicking! We are really happy that click.to made us the first to have this integration, and we know it’s important since our customers are very aggressive folder users.
There is a little set up required at first to get click.to to choose a folder. First you’ll have to type in the name of the folder that you want to upload into. If that folder already exists click.to will put the document directly into it; otherwise click.to will create the folder for you and put the file into it. We know this is a little bit of an effort the first time you try to pick a folder, but we appreciate the development effort that the click.to team put into creating the folder integration specifically for OfficeDrop. They intend to refine the folder selection UI in the future.
Setting up click.to to OfficeDrop
Here is a quick video that helps you set up the click.to/OfficeDrop integration.
Well, OfficeDrop did not win CloudBeat 2011 Innovation Showdown last week in Redwood City, but we did deliver a nice demo and meet some great people.
Congrats to the winner, Zadara Storage, a provider of virtual private storage arrays in the cloud!
You can read about our demo here on VentureBeat; here is what they wrote about our demo, “OfficeDrop also connects headquarters and workers in the field through file sharing, but it doesn’t end with the ability to share and manage users. Its mobile application allows small businesses to create and share files in the field. The company used the example of a cleaning service. At the end of a job, cleaners would need to fill out a proof of completion sheet, and take a picture of their work for the executives back at head quarters. Using the mobile app, workers can scan the completed sheet and take the picture of their cleaned room, which is created into a file and sent to the file share dashboard.”
The awesome folks over at DreamSimplicity, the SaaS Marketplace, sat down with Prasad and me at the recent CloudBeat Conference in Redwood city last week. Here is a video they shot that includes us running through beta products of where the service is going:
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.
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.
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!
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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 an award-winning online digital filing system & scanner software. 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 help our clients scan, sync, search and share documents. We’ll also highlight new features in our digital filing system, let you know what the press is saying about us and keep you up to speed with the goings-on at OfficeDrop! Paper. Digital. Anywhere.
