Archive for the ‘document scanning service’ Category

Top Nine of ’09

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

We’re all looking forward to the New Year here at OfficeDrop, but have found ourselves thinking back on the events of the last 12 months. To bring closure to the passing year, we’ve compiled a list of the top 9 most helpful/ popular blog posts of 2009.

Our Top Nine of ’09:

1. OfficeDrop Scans Google QR Code

Google brought about a new level of business advertising with the new QR code. We showed you how to scan your code and spread your business. You’ll be sure to see more of the QR code in 2010.

2. How Long Should I Save Tax Documents?

OfficeDrop makes storage of your tax documents easy and hassle free, but how long are you meant to hang on to this information? This post was especially popular and will become especially helpful come April.

3. Scanning Documents to OfficeDrop using Snow Leopard and Preview

Apple’s new OS made document scanning easier by allowing you to scan, view and correct files through the image preview. In this helpful blog post we provide a video informing you of how to get the most out of document scanning with Snow Leopard.

4. Steps to Create the Paperless Office

Going paperless is both productive for your office, and friendly toward the environment. In this blog post we’ve provided you with some important steps to move you in a paperless direction.

5. Count Your Documents (Series)

In our ‘count your documents’ series of blog posts, we help you answer the question “how much paper do I have?” You can use these guides to determine the paper count in your boxes, shelves, cabinets and unbound paper.

6. Online, DVD, USB, and Hard Drive: Finding the Best Storage Medium for Your Digital Documents

There are a lot of ways to store your digital documents. This post will give you a price breakdown of each option, and description of when each is most effective.

7. OfficeDrop Launches Information Site on Document Scanning Services

Some big news of ’09 was the launch of Documentscanningservice.com. Powered by OfficeDrop, Document Scanning Service is a free resource for those who want to know all the facts on document scanning.

8. Remember Everything, including paper, with OfficeDrop and Evernote

At OfficeDrop, we are really happy to have integrated with Evernote. With OfficeDrop and Evernote, you can get to your scanned documents without an internet connection. Find out how to use OfficeDrop and Evernote!

9. OfficeDrop iPhone Interface: The other side of ubiquitous capture

These days, mobile access is huge. OfficeDrop offers a mobile optimized web page so you can access all of your documents on the go on your iphone.

Those are our top nine of ’09. Hope you found them helpful. Let us know your thoughts on OfficeDrop, blog topics, or the past year by commenting below!

Posted in Document Management, Document Scanners, document scanning service, Evernote Document Management, Organization, Paperless, Paperless Champions, partnerships, Pixily, Product Features, Taxes | 1 Comment »

Pixily Launches Information Site on Document Scanning Services

Friday, December 18th, 2009

We are very excited to announce the launch of documentscanningservice.com, a resource center for small businesses looking for information on document scanning. As OfficeDrop continues to grow we’ve noticed that there are recurring questions from business owners about how to best use an outside vendor for document scanning services.

We hope that documentscanningservice.com will be a resource center that helps educate people on the important questions to ask when embarquing on a scanning project. The document scanning learning center includes information on making documents text searchable, DPI, storage mediums for digitally scanned images and more.

Of course, visitors will also be able to sign up for OfficeDrop’s document scanning services right from the site! We hope you find this resource helpful; let us know your thoughts.

Posted in document scanning service | No Comments »

Count Your Documents: Unbound Paper

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

Estimating how many documents you have is the first step in starting to convert your paper documents. However, with paper hiding in all sorts of forms, it can be difficult to know how much paper is in each store. Here is the second of several posts to help you estimate the paper volume in your office.

Paper Piles

Maybe you don’t exactly have your papers stored in a box or cabinet. Maybe they’re just…in piles. No need to worry, we have you covered. Paper stacks can be measured and estimated by the inch so you can start scanning them away.

Unbound Paper

Unbound paper piles have approximately 150 to 175 pages per inch.

Posted in document scanning service, Paperless, Pixily | No Comments »

Count Your Documents: Boxes

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Estimating how many documents you have is the first step in starting to convert your paper documents. If you are going to go paperless, you need to know how much paper you have! However, with paper hiding in all sorts of forms, it can be difficult to know how much paper is in each storage medium. Here is the first of several posts to help you estimate the paper volume in your office. Hopefully this will help you get ready for your document scanning project!

What’s in all these Boxes?

They’re square, heavy, and hold a lot of paper. How much paper, you’re wondering? Here are some standard estimates to help you see how much paper you have hiding in boxes.

standard-file-box2 banker-style-boxes3

15″ x 12″ x 11″ standard file box would contain approximately 2,000 to 2,500 pages

30″ x 12″ x 11″ large banker box would contain approximately 4,500 to 5,000 pages

box-page-count3

*Keep in mind these are estimates for full boxes.

Posted in document scanning service, Paperless | 1 Comment »

Online, DVD, USB, and Hard Drive: Finding the Best Storage Medium for Your Digital Documents

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

When you sign up with OfficeDrop document scanning service, we give you options as to where your data can be stored. In addition to online data storage, OfficeDrop provides data storage in the form of DVDs, USB memory sticks, and external hard drives. Options are great, but you may be wondering which one is right for you. Size, price, and storage methods will determine the best storage medium.

Here are some suggestions to make your document scanning service most convenient for you:

Online Database (Multiple Scale Storage)

We believe that storing your files online is by far the most versatile, time effective way to access your document images. Documents can be accessed from any computer with an internet connection, anytime, and don’t require any physical storage. Online storage is billed per month by page and you can store 3,000 pages for under $20 per month. We highly recommend online storage for any business but provide the following alternate storage options to meet consumer preferences.

DVDs (Small to Medium Scale Storage)

The average DVD can store around 5 gigabytes of document images (5,000 – 10,000 images). DVD storage is cheap and effective if your office is well suited to store DVDs, which are used infrequently enough that locating and storing disks doesn’t become most of your workday. Physically storing DVDs is relatively simple, as they can be stacked easily in just about any bookshelf.

USBs (Small to Medium Scale Storage)

The USB drives we provide have a capacity similar to a DVD, but are the more expensive choice. Extra costs for USB drives will pay off in their added durability, portability, and easier file sharing. If the data you’re storing finds itself being passed around a lot, a USB may be the more convenient choice for you. Storing a single USB drive is easy, but if you need more than a couple, locating the correct one right away in a drawer can be inefficient.

External Hard Drives (Large Scale Storage)

An external hard drive is a great choice for those huge document blocks that can’t fit anywhere else. An external hard drive is the recommended storage medium for storage projects that are 250 gigabytes and up. Pricing for hard drives is done by images, starting at $25 for 5,000 images with discounts for higher volumes. If you’re up to your ankles in DVDs or USB drives, it’s probably a good time to consolidate that information on an external hard drive. Over 50,000 images, an external hard drive almost always makes sense due to its ease of use and price. Storing all of your information in one place is organizationally sound as well as ideal for sharing a high volume of information over your network at once. External hard drives are also a preferred choice when security is a priority. External hard drives can be locked away physically if frequent access is unnecessary.

Data Storage Comparison Table:

Here is a table to help you compare our storage options and pricing.

Hopefully we have helped you choose the document scanning service that is right for you. If you are still unsure of which method would work best for your business, feel free to contact us directly with questions via email or phone. At OfficeDrop, our aim is to make your digital document storage simple, easy, and affordable.

Posted in Document Management, document scanning service, Pricing | 2 Comments »

OCR Software: Giving You The World’s Greatest Filing Assistant

Monday, November 16th, 2009

Every business wants to be organized. When it comes to paper documents, it used to be that organization was proportional to hours of meticulous filing and labeling. After all, what good is storing a file if you can never find it again?

OCR Software Makes it Easy

Nowadays, we have OCR software to find documents instantly, no matter how it’s stored. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) means that, once scanned, the words on a document can be recognized, searched, and retrieved by a computer. Think of it as an assistant who has every word, phrase and topic of every document you have ever filed memorized. Not only that, but this assistant can retrieve any document you’ve described instantly, along with others like it.

Document scanning services like OfficeDrop provide you with that very assistant. Hours spent organizing paper documents physically can be replaced by sending them to OfficeDrop for digital conversion. The best scanning + OCR projects need:

High quality OCR. Without highly accurate OCR software, your text will not be searchable. Our tests have shown that Abby’s OCR engine is the most accurate.
Intelligent index. The index is just like the index in a book; it references where the words, characters and numbers appear in your set of documents and can point you to them.
High enough DPI. DPI is an indication of the detail of the scan. We recommend 200+ DPI. With 200 DPI, your images will be clear enough so that your OCR can cleanly read the words in your documents.
Central digital storage. If you are going to easily search your files, you need them in a single location. The best scanning and OCR aren’t helpful if you have to search through dozens of DVDs to find file that you are looking for.
Easy to use search. Complicated search (highly structured search) works for some engineering intensive fields, but is usually not user friendly enough to be helpful for the typical small business. A simple search tool (think of it as your own personal Google search box) is the easiest way to sort through your files.

Once stored, you are able to search all documents via search terms, and never have to stress about organizing or finding those documents again. Document storage and retrieval is easy with OCR and OfficeDrop.

Posted in Document Management, document scanning service, Organization, Pixily | No Comments »

Magazine Back Issue Scanning Services

Friday, November 13th, 2009

At OfficeDrop, we’ve been approached by a few magazine publishers who are looking to digitize their old issues. Their magazine scanning projects are really interesting. It makes sense that magazines would want to make their old issues text searchable PDFs that can be shown online and crawled by search engines. All that content is perfect for some SEO love from Google, and people are very likely searching for that sort of content everyday! Yet another neat use of OfficeDrop’s document scanning services.

Picking a magazine scanning services provider

Magazine scanning services require special attention. Most scanners can’t easily scan bound material. Older issues have the problem that ink from the other side of the page can seep through. Older, larger sized magazines may not fit in conventional scanners. If magazines haven’t been properly stored they can have creases or wrinkles that need to be flattened out prior to scanning. Remember that bound material may require cutting or hand scanning – which can become quite expensive.

If you are launching a magazine scanning project, you should first send a few samples to your scanning provider to make sure they can handle your scanning job. We recommend sending both a recent issue and one of the older issues as well. The older issues are the ones that tend to have the most yellowing/color issues and the most ink bleed through, so you’ll want to make sure you can get the quality of scanning that you’ll need.

Also, you’ll want to test the OCR software that your provider will use. Without OCR, your PDFs won’t become text searchable. You need OCR to get search engine traffic to your past issues; otherwise they are images that search engines like Google and Bing can’t see into.

DPI also becomes important if you are going to be displaying the images/PDFs online. If the DPI you pick is too large then you’ll end up with very, very large files and images – and thus they won’t be easy for your magazine readers to view online.

Let us know if we can help you out with a magazine scanning project! Call us at 1-888-674-6493. Good luck with your digitization project!

Posted in document scanning service, Paperless | No Comments »

Trade Show Document Management

Friday, November 6th, 2009

Have you ever come back from a trade show with a bundle of interesting papers, pamphlets and business cards – but not know how or where to store them? At OfficeDrop, we are always amazed at the uses our customers are finding for our document management service.

Scanning trade show materials

One of our most recent scanning projects involved scanning materials our customer picked up at a series of trade shows. We are now scanning these documents into his secure document management portal. Since he’s got the files named neatly according the to show he visited we are able to label each file according to the trade show where he collected it. Now, he’s not only going to be able to file and organize all of these materials in his online OfficeDrop account, he’s also going to be able to text search within all of these materials for specific terms or products.

Another cool use of OfficeDrop’s document scanning and document management service!

Some trade show materials may require hand-scanning for an additional charge.

Posted in Document Management, document scanning service, Paperless, Pixily | 1 Comment »

Document and Photo Scanning Collaboration Interview

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Deb Lee, a well known professional organizer, recently posted an interview she had with me (Healy Jones, marketing guy @pixily) on OfficeDrop and ScanDigital’s collaboration to help small businesses and consumers scan their documents AND photos. Check out Deb’s interview and the discussion on OfficeDrop and ScanDigital here!

Posted in document scanning service, partnerships, Pixily, Press coverage | 2 Comments »

Pixily in BusinessWeek – How Our Document Scanning and Document Management Service Was Started

Monday, October 26th, 2009

BusinessWeek Asks “How was your business idea hatched?”

OfficeDrop founder Prasad Thammineni talks about the moment when he came up with the idea behind OfficeDrop‘s document scanning and document management service with BusinessWeek reporter, Amy Barett. Amy’s article, “Beyond Eureka,” lays out five steps for starting a business from interviews with 20 serial entrepreneurs. Amy suggests setting parameters for the business, brainstorming potential ideas, picking a winner idea, assessing feasibility, and testing a prototype.

Prasad explains how he was overwhelmed with paper during his MBA as Wharton and created his own system to scan, store and shred it. He realized that there was demand for this sort of a service when other students him to borrow his system. Realizing he was onto something, he interviewed a number of small businesses are discovered that there was a market for digitizing and managing small business’ paper. Thus, OfficeDrop’s document management and document scanning service was born!

A wide variety of companies are profiled – everything from clothing companies for people with limited mobility to an online service for creating computer games – including Cooper Martin, Sensible Garden, Sharendipity and Weardrobe.

Posted in Document Management, document scanning service, Entrepreneurship, Pixily, Press coverage, Shredding, Small Business | No Comments »