Archive for the ‘Organization’ Category

OfficeDrop Android App Launched!

Thursday, May 12th, 2011

OfficeDrop’s Paper-to-Go Android App Now Available for Download

We are very pleased to announce the launch of OfficeDrop’s newest mobile app, the OfficeDrop Paper-to-Go Android App! OfficeDrop’s Android App allows Android users to simply snap a photo of a paper document and scan it directly to the cloud. Within the app, users can organize, search, share and access documents from anywhere with OfficeDrop’s cloud filing cabinet. Also available for iPad, OfficeDrop Paper-to-Go can now be downloaded through the Android Market (https://market.android.com/details?id=com.officedrop.applicationactivity&feature=search_result) and will soon be offered through the Amazon App Store.

OfficeDrop Android App

OfficeDrop Android App

This newest app is something that our customers have been asking for, and over the past six months it has become obvious that mobile access to our digital filing cabinet is a must-have feature. We know that the busy professionals who are our customers love having access to their paper and digital files from the road via our web browser and our desktop digital cloud connector. Being able to search, organize and share from the road will make it even easier to carry your filing cabinet with you where ever your business takes you.

Scan From Android

The OfficeDrop Android App also lets you scan right from your phone, using the phone’s camera to snap multiple page documents and convert them into text searchable PDFs. Some of our customers are already using their phones to snap photos of things like receipts while on the road – this makes it even easier to grab PDFs on the go. You can use it to organize your business receipts while travelling, share just signed contracts, get invoices back to the home office and more! Because you can pick a destination folder and add labels at the time of scanning, organizing is simple and fast. And since everything becomes text searchable, finding the piece of paper has never been easier.

Other Great Paper to Go Features

Compatible with version 2.2 of Android, the app allows OfficeDrop users to send documents straight to the cloud – either by taking a picture or by uploading files already stored on the device. Other key features include:

  • Search: Documents become text-searchable once they’re uploaded using OCR technology.
  • Tagging: Files can be tagged with keywords for easy sorting and retrieval.
  • Compatibility: Works on your Windows PC, your browser or your iPad.
  • Security: As with other OfficeDrop apps and services, all files sent through the system are fully encrypted.

Let us know what you think about our newest app!

Messiest Office Contest

Wednesday, May 11th, 2011

We’ve got some great entries in our messiest office contest! It’s not too late to sign up to win – all you need to do is to upload a photo of your office:

Messy Office Photos

Messy Office Photos

Remember, you can win some great prizes, including a scanner, Professional Organizer consulting, an OfficeDrop subscription and a coupon to Staples:

Grand Prize
Win a $400 Gift Certificate to Staples, a Coaching Session with Professional Organizer Joshua Zerkel of Custom Living Solutions to assess your needs and lead your office away from the clutter, and an OfficeDrop subscription to help you go paperless!

2nd Prize
Win a Canon imageFORMULA P-150 Portable Document Scanner and a subscription to OfficeDrop to help you go paperless!

3rd Prize
Win a $50 Gift Certificate to Staples and a subscription to OfficeDrop to help you go paperless!

Contest Instructions
Keep stubbing your toe in your cluttered office? Trouble finding your keyboard? No room left for your employees? If your office is buried in a mountain of paper, the OfficeDrop Messiest Business Makeover can give you the professional help you need.

To enter: Submit a photo of your cluttered space. Show us your office at its worst! OfficeDrop will select the top five submissions and let the Facebook community vote on the messiest!

Sign up here: http://wildfireapp.com/website/6/contests/111298?ogn=website

Prize Eligibility

Only persons residing in United States who are at least 18 years of age can enter.

Contest Starts
May 02, 2011 @ 12:01 am (EDT)
Contest Ends
May 21, 2011 @ 11:59 pm (EDT)

Win 3 Months of OfficeDrop from NAPO New England

Thursday, April 14th, 2011

napo-logoNAPO (the National Association of Professional Organizers) of New England is hosting a contest until April 23rd – and they are giving away three months of OfficeDrop’s Home Office plan! This is your chance to try OfficeDrop’s award winning mail in scanning service for an entire quarter for free! Go to http://napo-newengland.com/blog/?p=485 to sign up for the Organized Office contest!

More from NAPO NE on this exciting contest:

If you are looking for tips from the organizing professionals about how to keep your office running efficiently, then you’ve landed in the right place! NAPO-NE gathered some of the best tips from our local experts to help keep your office space running smoothly and efficiently. Our associate member, OfficeDrop has donated an amazing prize for the winner.

Entering the giveaway is EASY – simply read our expert tips below (as in the tips in the blog post we linked to above) and post a comment letting us know your favorite. After posting your comment, you’ll be entered to win a three-month Home Office subscription to OfficeDrop.com. OfficeDrop makes it simple to get your paper files online with three simple methods to connect your physical, paper-based world with the convenience of an online digital filing system. You can find an outline of pricing and services by clicking here.

Our winner will be randomly selected after the giveaway ends at 11:59pm on April 23rd, 2011. We’ll contact the winner via email and then send them a coupon code to register for the Office Drop account. You can find a complete overview of the giveaway rules following this post.

For more tips and organizing ideas, please link to us on Twitter and Facebook.

4 Steps to Better Receipt Management

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

Josh Zerkel, Professional Organizer and owner of Custom Living Solutions, has recently posted a great piece on getting control of your receipts. At OfficeDrop, we help a lot of people manage their paperwork, and his 4 steps apply if you are using a digital filing system or standard paper folders. Check out his post!

receipt-management

We think that OfficeDrop’s paperless solution can help with his 2nd step – sorting, which can be done in our online folders and by using our labels. Finding a home is easy when you have a digital filing system and you can use either our mail in scanning service to get paper into your account or our ScanDrop scanning software (including the Mac version) to get digital. Tracking, step 4, is easy when we make your paper text searchable!

Desktop Organizing Tip

Tuesday, February 15th, 2011

Here is another tip from the Living Peace Professional Organizer team. This one is on organizing your desk, and has some simple steps for dealing with paper clutter as it come into your office.

Of course, we’d love it if  you sent the “filing” paper to OfficeDrop for our mail-in scanning, or if you used our scanning software to upload the files directly into the cloud!

Desktop Organizing Tip

OfficeDrop Introduces Envelope Tracking

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010

It’s 8:00- do you know where your scanvelopes are?

You asked and we listened! Introducing up-to-the-minute envelope tracking from directly within your OfficeDrop account. See exactly when we receive your scanvelopes here at our facility, when they’re being processed, and when they’re either on their way back to you or to our shredders. No more wondering if your documents have been received or when they’ll be ready- with our new envelope tracking tab, all the information is at your fingertips.

Using Envelope Tracking

To track your scanvelopes, simply click the Account tab from within your OfficeDrop account. In the menu box to the left, select the Envelope tracking option. Here, you can see all scanvelope tracking codes currently associated with your account, and the status of the contents of each of these individual scanvelopes.

scanvelopetracking1

You can sort the results by stage as well.

envelope-tracking

Finally, you can use envelope tracking to quick find the group of documents that were scanned in each envelope. By clicking on the specific envelope you will be taken to the documents that were scanned in that particular envelope.

documents-in-tracked-envelope

And as always, if you have any questions about your documents, you can reach us at support@officedrop.com or 888-674-6493.

Managing Distributed Teams with Enterprise 2.0

Monday, November 8th, 2010

fiercecontentmanagementI recently came across an article on Enterprise 2.0 and “the disconnected knowledge worker” by Ron Miller of Fierce Content Management. Ron’s thesis is that new collaboration tools can help keep distributed workforces in close contact, promote team building and enhance efficiency.

I 100% agree!

OfficeDrop’s team is in several time zones and we use a variety of tools to manage our company. We even use enterprise 2.0 tools to manage our scanning center – even though it is not distributed, we have a couple of shifts of workers and need to make sure each shift has all the information they need to successfully complete projects for our clients.

We also use our own tool to manage relationships with our investment group, bookkeeper and lawyer. Cloud content management + distributed scanning and online cloud document storage really help keep us on the same page. When we scan a document into OfficeDrop’s online storage (or email it to the cloud), we pick specific folders that we have shared with our service providers, like our accountant. At the end of the month, she knows to look in those folders for supporting documents that help her close our books.

Emailing Documents Into OfficeDrop

Monday, September 27th, 2010

You can email documents directly into your OfficeDrop account. The email bodies and attachments in any of the supported formats will be processed to your OfficeDrop account, just like the documents you mail in or upload.

How emailing into OfficeDrop works

Each OfficeDrop account gets its own unique email address, which is <your-username>@myofficedrop.com. So for example, if the username you use to login at OfficeDrop is johnorganizer, your OfficeDrop email address will be johnorganizer@myofficedrop.com.

Documents attached to this email, in addition to the email itself, will be uploaded into your OfficeDrop online digital filing system. You can share this email address with your coworkers, customers, partners, etc and they can send files into your account as well. However, you will have to provision the system to accept emails from these people – I’ll explain how in a moment.

Everything submitted into OfficeDrop via email becomes text searchable and can be labeled, put into folders, etc. There is a special string you can use in the subject line to automatically direct the email and its contents into a specific folder/label, which I will explain at the end of this email.

What happens when you email something into your OfficeDrop Account

We send an acknowledgment to both the sender and to you, that we have received an email to be processed. The email will then be processed to your account.

Both the email’s body and its attachments (in supported file formats) will be processed to your account. OfficeDrop currently supports over 25 file types, including: PDF, TIFF, JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF, TXT, HTML, DOC, XLS, and PPT. So these files will be uploaded into OfficeDrop

And to state the obvious, both the email body and the attachments will all be made searchable.

If a document fails processing, an email will be sent so that you can inform the sender.

Controlling spam and who can send emails into your OfficeDrop account

By default, only the email id that you provide while registering with OfficeDrop is enabled to send you email. So, if you provided johnorganizer@gmail.com while registering with OfficeDrop, you can already send emails from that email id.

You can modify the settings by clicking into the “tools” “upload via email” links in your account (click here and log in to visit this page.) Note that you can allow individuals to send you emails with their specific email address and/or can allow everyone from specific email domains to email you.

If you have multiple email accounts that you use then you should make sure you give those email addresses permission to email into your OfficeDrop account!

The following image also explains how to modify these settings:

Email to OfficeDrop

Email to OfficeDrop

How customers are using OfficeDrop’s email feature

It is hard to believe, but we introduced the email-into-OfficeDrop feature in 2008! Since then we’ve been amazed at how different customers have used this feature to get more out of their OfficeDrop account. Here are some of the many ways people are using this feature:

  • Automatically send online receipts into OfficeDrop while shopping online. All you have to do is to user your OfficeDrop email address. The same applies for online travel itineraries too.
  • Configuring e-faxes to go directly into OfficeDrop. If you get your faxes today via an e-fax service you can set the fax service to automatically send an email of each fax. Authorizing your OfficeDrop account to accept emails from your fax system is a smart way to access these faxes without having to print them.
  • Most multi-function printers, desktop and office scanners support the ability to “Scan to Email”. If you have a scanner, you can “Scan to email” any document and add it instantly to your OfficeDrop account. Document types supported by such scanners (TIFF, PDF, JPG) are all supported by OfficeDrop. Of course, we also recommend our ScanDrop Scanning Software to connect your scanner to the cloud…
  • Snapping photos with their cameras and sending the images to OfficeDrop. Take a picture of that receipt, or your favorite wine’s label and send it as an email attachment right from your phone.
  • Forwarding their own customers’ invoices, contracts, etc directly from their email into OfficeDrop. Why bother to download and then upload a file when you can get it directly into your account?
  • Using email to OfficeDrop to get files onto their iPad. Since OfficeDrop released the iPad application, many users have been sending attachments from email into OfficeDrop so that they can access and text-search the attachments on their iPad.

Sending emails directly into specific folders and adding labels

Your emails and their attachments can be sent into specific folders at the time you send the email. By adding a simple string into your email’s subject you can change where it goes. Add #Folder: customers/acme corp to the end of your email’s subject line to send it into the “acme corp” folder. To add a particular label, the syntax is the same: #Labels: label1,label2,label3 in the email subject.

Need a Professional Organizer in New England?

Friday, September 24th, 2010

Then check out the newly redesigned NAPO New England website! The site offers an easy tool for finding Professional Organizers who can fit your needs, and also has a healthy list of organizational tools (including OfficeDrop) in their partner page.

organizer-website

At OfficeDrop, we work with a lot of Professional Organizers who are helping their clients go paperless as part of the organization process. We really recommend that small business owners who are feeling overwhelmed with their company’s disorganization talk to some PO’s to see if they can get professional help getting organized.

Productivity Boosting Paperless Tools

Monday, September 20th, 2010

Josh Zerkel, a Professional Organizer with Custom Living Solutions in San Francisco, recently made a series of how-to videos explaining how small businesses can use tools to go paperless. Here is a video where Josh talks about different productivity boosting tools.

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