Paperless Champions | Document Management Blog

Archive for the ‘Paperless Champions’ Category

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

Our ScanDrop scanning software continues to provide us with interesting data on people’s use of scanners, in particular when they are trying to scan their documents into the cloud.

A while back we released data on the time of day that is most popular for people to use their scanners to get data into the cloud. We also found out which scanners were the most popular “cloud” scanners. Now it is time to reveal:

The Most Popular Day of the Week to Scan

Weekday People Use Scanner

It is Wednesday! Not a big surprise; the middle of the week is when people most likely have the largest amount of paper on their desk.

Posted in cloud computing, Paperless Champions, scandrop, scanning software | No Comments »

Getting the Most out of OfficeDrop’s Cloud Dashboard

Monday, December 27th, 2010

Mylee, one of OfficeDrop’s resident customer happiness rockstars, recently wrote a very helpful review on how to get the most out of OfficeDrop’s cloud document management dashboard. (This is much better than the cloud dashboard post I published last week!)

Introducing the new OfficeDrop Cloud Dashboard!

It’s finally here! We’re proud to introduce the new OfficeDrop dashboard, which gives you an at-a-glance summary of your OfficeDrop account’s contents and recent activity. Now you can view the status of your most recent scanvelope, view all your recent account activity, and see what’s new at OfficeDrop- all from the same page! OfficeDrop’s new dashboard was designed to give you all your pertinent account information at your fingertips-without having to go from tab to tab.

Anatomy of the Dashboard

See below to learn all the different sections in our new dashboard and how each can help you save time and get the most out of OfficeDrop’s document management service.

OfficeDrop's Cloud Dashboard Overview

A. Recent product updates

In this section, you’ll see updates about what’s new here at OfficeDrop, any new products or features we’ve released, and click through links on how to use them:

Dashboard Product Updates

B. Document Processing Activity

See the current status of all your paper and digital files. You can check the status of your most recent scanvelope, or get a list of your most recent document uploads, which folder they’re in, and the upload date. The document names and scanvelope tracking IDs are click through links that allow you to access those particular files immediately, without having to go through the Documents tab.

C. View Documents

Use this section to get directly to your documents quickly and easily. Use the click through links to go directly to your document queue, your newest documents, your Items Not in Folder, or your Favorites folder.

View Cloud Documents

D. Addons Activity

Manage your OfficeDrop integrations directly from the Addons Activity section. You can view the docs you’ve sent to other cloud services like Evernote and GoogleDocs, and access them directly using the click through link file names.

E. Account Activity

From this section, you view all actions performed in your account as well as across any sub-users if you are a multi-user account administrator. You’ll see what user created which folders, who uploaded which documents, and all other actions performed across your OfficeDrop account. It is a great place to manage and audit the data you are storing in the cloud.

F. Alerts and Reminders

Check this section often for information about your account, when you’re close to your storage limit, and other up to the minute account information that will help you manage your OfficeDrop account.

Posted in Benefits, cloud computing, OfficeDrop, Paperless Champions, Product Announcements, Product Features, Product Updates | No Comments »

OfficeDrop Text Search

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

One of OfficeDrop’s best features is the ability to do a full text search of your scanned paper and your digital files. Since OfficeDrop uses OCR to make everything you put into the system text searchable, finding the file you need quickly is as easy as searching for information online.

Search Files with OfficeDrop

Searching files within OfficeDrop is easy, but there are a number of tricks you can use to narrow down your search results. The search box is located in the top right corner after you’ve logged into your account.

Text Search Example

Narrowing Down Your Text Search Results

There are a number of tricks you can use to narrow down your search results. Here are some of the key text-search features:

Phrase search – Use quotation marks around a series of words to narrow down your search to words that appear in that specific order. So, if you put “invoice number” in quotes in the search box, the OfficeDrop search would first return results with those words next to each other.

Phrase Search

Enter multiple words to narrow down relevancy: If you enter multiple words into the search box, OfficeDrop will search first for documents that contain all of these words.

Search within Folders and Labels: If you click into a folder and/or pick a label(s), when you search your results will be confined to the the folder/label(s) that you’ve selected. This is a way to narrow down the results. You need to 1st: use the search box, then 2nd: narrow down the results by picking the folder/labels. If you are first in the folder and then use the search box OfficeDrop will search ALL your files, not just those in the folder, so the order you use is important.

Folder Label Text Search

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Posted in Benefits, Digital Office, OCR Scanning, Paperless, Paperless Champions, Product Features, Product Updates | No Comments »

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.

Posted in Organization, Paperless, Paperless Champions | No Comments »

OfficeDrop: All About the Cloud

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

At OfficeDrop, we’ve noticed more and more visitors coming to our site who’ve searched for the word “cloud.” But since the cloud has so many meanings to so many people, we’d thought we’d explain how we see small businesses taking advantage of the power of cloud computing to get more out of their paper and digital documents. Our understanding of how businesses use the cloud is rapidly evolving as we grow!

Connecting Cloud Services

More and more, we are seeing the benefits of the cloud in terms of connecting data to other services. Paper no longer has to be stuck in a silo’ed document management service, but can instead be accessed and shared with other software via a cloud filing cabinet. Data can be pushed from one place into another to take advantage of unique technologies – like Evernote’s amazing mobile clients or FreshBooks’ unique invoicing software. (OfficeDrop has recently released an API to allow other software developers to build off of our document scanning service and digital filing system/digital office.) Cloud content management makes this all possible.

Why Cloud Computing Is Great for Small Businesses

Cloud computing is great for small businesses for a number of reasons. As we mentioned in our blog post, “An Introduction to Cloud Computing for Small Business Owners:”

“Cloud computing is a platform for accessing and utilizing your businesses IT via the internet. This means nearly all of your IT resources – your servers, data storage, software/ programs – are hosted on the internet. It used to be that all of your computing would have to be done by your own servers, hardwired to your business. Now that the internet is around, your servers don’t have to be hardwired, and you don’t even need to have your own. Instead, you can rent server space from anywhere in the country from people like Amazon, who have already paid the overhead. Utilizing this system with SaaS, which does the same thing with software, one could theoretically run an entire business from various cyber cafés (if those still exist) without purchasing any of their own personal hardware or software at all.”

We Are Still Learning About the Cloud – From Our Customers!

OfficeDrop continues to learn more and more about how small business owners want to interact with the cloud (and their data!) When we first founded the company 3 years ago (wow, that’s a long time) we thought that web browsers would be the favorite way for users to access their data. But we were wrong. With the success of our downloadable apps, we’ve noticed something pretty amazing: Business owners like to use applications to visit the cloud, not browsers.

Beyond the Cloud Filing Cabinet and OfficeDrop’s Cloud App Strategy

As our cloud scanning software app, ScanDrop, continues to take off and since our iPad “paper to go” app was in the top 10 business ipad applications in itunes, we’ve realized that apps are a great way to interact with the cloud.

OfficeDrop Free App Downloads

And by “realized” we mean that our customers made it clear that they like apps!

Our CEO, Prasad, has been busy training some of our web developers in desktop programming, and our CTO, Vik, has dusted off his Objective-C skills for our Mac versions.

We will have a new way to interact with our cloud digital filing service from the desktop soon for Windows users. And Mac users will soon be able to scan to the cloud just like their PC friends.

We are also busy working on creating workflow specific desktop/cloud solutions for paper intensive industries, starting with accountants and bookkeepers. We just did the first demonstration of our new bookkeeping software, which was very well received, and hope to enroll beta users toward the end of the month. This software will connect the popular QuickBooks software with paper in a number of powerful ways: from the scanner, desktop and cloud. Let us know if you are interested in trying this service!

We are having a ton of fun here at OfficeDrop, helping business owners harness the power of cloud computing. Of course, we haven’t forgotten the importance of actually speaking with customers. Give us a call at 888-674-6493 if you ever want to chat about getting your paper and filing cabinets into the cloud!

Posted in Benefits, cloud computing, Digital Office, Document Management, Evernote Document Management, Freshbooks Document Management, iPad, Market Research, OfficeDrop, Organization, Paperless, Paperless Champions, partnerships, Product Updates, scandrop, Small Business | 2 Comments »

Going Paperless – Options

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

These days, there are a number of different way to go paperless. Of course, OfficeDrop is one of them, but in this video, Josh Zerkel, a Professional Organizer in San Francisco and founder of Custom Living Solutions, outlines the different options you have when going paperless.

Josh outlines the different types of scanner available, the power of OCR, online backup, text-search, different online applications and mail-in scanning services.

Video – The Options You Have When Going Paperless

Posted in Benefits, cloud computing, Digital Office, Document Management, Document Scanners, document scanning service, Organization, Paperless, Paperless Champions | 1 Comment »

Get Organized Webinar Tomorrow

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

Josh Zerkel, a Professional Organizer and CEO of Custom Living Solutions, will give an online talk tomorrow as part of Intuit’s Get Organized Get Rewarded campaign. He will be discussing various technology strategies for realizing the paperless office dream. You can sign up for his talk at: http://community.intuit.com/small_business_events

He has also written a post on Intuit’s small business blog on using technologies to start on the path to the paperless office. Read it here: http://smallbusiness.intuit.com/blog/where-small-is-now/2010/05/tech-tools-to-boost-productivity-–-part-1.html

Posted in Document Management, Organization, Paperless, Paperless Champions | 1 Comment »

Try OfficeDrop for Free – You Could Win A Free Kindle!

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

We’re proud to announce that OfficeDrop has been featured as one of the workplace apps featured on Intuit’s “Get Organized. Get Rewarded” campaign. Designed to get businesses started with helpful organization apps, OfficeDrop and other helpful tools will offer free trials and other limited-time offers for a one month period.

Ok so here’s the kindle part: As part of the campaign, Intuit is giving away a Kindle to users who will increase their chances of winning the more they sign up for apps and use them. You are automatically eligible once you sign up for a workplace app, so be sure to sign up for your OfficeDrop free trial through Intuit to give yourself the chance to win.

If you find yourself wading through paper, or struggling to utilize information around your office, now is the perfect opportunity to sign up for the apps that can save your sanity. OfficeDrop and other featured apps will require little to no commitment and will be sure to get you organized quickly and easily. If that wasn’t enough, you might win a kindle too. What’s not to love?

Posted in Document Management, Marketing, OfficeDrop, Paperless, Paperless Champions | No Comments »

City of Cambridge Outlaws Paper to Fight Global Warming

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

Cambridge, MA (April first, 2010) Yesterday, in a drastic attempt to curb the effects of global warming, the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts officially outlawed the use of paper in all forms. As quoted in the City’s bill, “Carbon emissions are making the Earth warmer, and trees reduce carbon. We can no longer afford to betray our barked brethren with this wasteful destruction of plant life for flimsy paper sheets. It is time to embrace the digital age.”

With all utilization of paper being revoked, the City has been thrown into a state of chaos. Residents have turned to drastic measures with reports of checks being written on ripped cloth, and restaurant spills being absorbed by slices of bread.

A local woman exclaimed “I went to the store to buy toilet tissue, and they handed me a USB drive and assured me that all the digital TP I would ever need was stored on it! I don’t care if you can store 10,000 sheets on one drive, how do I actually use this stuff?”

Though some townspeople embraced the new law as a progressive and much awaited change, others revolted against the revocation of the popular material, and protested in front of town hall. Protestors chanted slogans like “Digital for later, we want our paper” and carried signs describing graphic details of the inefficiencies of digital paper in the bathroom.

In local shops, customers were not given paper receipts, but were instead sent emails. Birthday gifts are now wrapped in cellophane of which recipients complain “kind of ruins the surprise.”

To ensure compliance, a specialized Cambridge police squad was assigned to seek out paper users, revoke the illegal substances, and write tickets. Ticketing proved difficult, however, when police officers realized there was nothing to write offenders’ names on.

Posted in Paperless, Paperless Champions | No Comments »