Office Document Strategies Blog

Anyone who spends any time at all listening to what happens in the technology and retail fields will know by now that Amazon experienced intermittent outages with the launch of their 2018 Prime Day on Monday afternoon this week.  For anyone who is not up to what is happening at the world's most aggressive online retailer each year they launch a roughly 36 hour promotion day which makes Black Friday in the US and Boxing Day in Canada look tiny.  Estimates are that over 3.4 billion dollars in sales will be produced this year on Prime Day in spite of the glitches which occurred. 

It is over twenty five years ago that our company started to actively work in the field of document management.  In the early days it was called document imaging as the primary technology involved using high speed scanners to scan and capture images of paper documents for long term storage and retrieval. 

Stories continue to abound about cyber attacks, hacking and new potential threats to the security of Canada's IT systems.  For many SMEs the thoughts of addressing the many potential threats, while they work hard to provide business growth, good service to customers and returns on investment, is pretty challenging.  Since for many companies the IT environment is still kind of unknowable territory especially when looking at security issues it is not hard to accept that they can become overwhelmed by all of the negative news.  

Its been a couple of weeks since the new EU privacy legislation has come into effect.  This legislation is the strongest and most defined legislation dealing with the use of data collected through online activities and could easily become a model for what happens in other jurisdictions including  Canada and the US.

The Canadian Federal Government has introduced revisions to the Canada Elections Act designed to address concerns about how electronic interference affects future voting.  Given all the controversy about US, European and other jurisdictions being affected by both individual and country sponsored hacking during elections this is a timely and important topic for Canada given the numbers of elections coming over the next couple of years,

There are many tools which are used in an office which become part of the underlying work flow without anyone really being aware.  In many cases these are software tools which have become inherently integrated into the daily work of many employees.  

If you think of the basic categories of software tools there are some which can be kind of generic, like your office suite for example, and some which become very industry and company specific. 

Facebook has lost $100B in value — and its money problems...

Facebook's value drops $40B as stock tumbles over data scandal

Facebook value drops by $37bn amid privacy backlash - BBC News

Sometimes organizations loose sight of how every interaction in their work has customer service implications.  Sometimes it is possible to loose clients, suppliers or others through oversights due to a loss of focus.  

Every part of an organization has customer service implications and the people responsible must be encouraged to ensure that they do their best to support a positive corporate image.  Recently, I have seen a couple of instances where the lack of simple tools makes good customer service tough.

A little real life experience:

Last fall my wife and I had the opportunity to take a two week packaged tour to Italy conducted by Trafalgar Tours.  Trafalgar is one of the biggest tour companies in the world with some 20 or so brands under their banner.  They work hard to promote their tours with lots of advertising, good information and varied choices through out the world.

Our tour was conducted by a talented, very capable Tour Director who worked exceedingly hard to deliver the trip in a top notch manner.  At the end of the tour while headed to our last night everyone was asked to fill in a paper tour evaluation while on the bus. 

We have covered some of the ways that creative people have applied the technologies which have grown out of the early ventures in 3D printing in a number of articles over the past few years.  The concept continues to grow as more and more ways are found to apply the concept using different types of mediums as well as different kinds of tools to create the printed items.

Anyone watching the political situation in the US knows that cybercrime has become more than just an economic tool.  The political use of cybercrime is potentially even more critical to the world than the economic impacts but understanding this should not have any of us forget how critical the dollar costs are.