"How a Web-Based Filing Cabinet Can Enhance Your Business Part 2 - An In Depth Look"

Complete Transcript of
James MacKay - Stephen Lawton - Ecofiling Interview
On Let's Talk Computers
Host Alan Ashendorf
July 4 2009

 

Alan: Today on Let’s Talk Computers, we will be taking a more in-depth look at the web-based office management system, Ecofiling and what makes this system different that’s from other web-based office management systems. Our guests today are James MacKay President, President of Ecofiling and Stephen Lawton, Marketing Manager with Ecofiling. Welcome back to Let’s Talk Computers, Guys.

James: Thanks for having us, Alan.

Alan: The last time you gave us a short introduction to Ecofiling – what it is and how easy it is to set up. But, let’s just get down to the meat and potatoes. One of the huge problems that a lot of companies are facing is interoffice communication. Especially with gas prices soaring again, so many workers are working offsite and communication with every one in the company is a really big problem.

There is email, of course, but all it takes is for one email not to get to where it is needed to get and you could have a potential disaster on your hands. But you have a message system built into Ecofiling that eliminates a lot of the problems that emails have, because all of the messages reside on the Ecofiling system.

James: That’s right. Better than that, you also get an email sent to you as well, just as a courtesy, but the administrator or the person who has sent you the message can actually determine when you read that message. So there’s a big of a log, so that you can’t use that old excuse, “Uh, I didn’t get the message.” Well, now I have proof that you did.

So, for those important company documents you can instantly do that. Having that kind of logging is really good of auditing purposes, too. Because if you have an important document or a company policy that you just legally must be read, then you don’t actually have to go and follow it all up. You can have a generated report to show you who haven’t done it yet.

Alan: So you can actually see who logged in, who read what, who downloaded what file or checked it out – so you have complete control over your business without having this humongous office staff.

James: And companies actually use it for training, which take for instance a fire escape policy that has been uploaded and everyone in the company has to read that and get a message and then you must read this document.

The person who sent that request out can follow up and say, “Well, Joe, you haven’t read this yet, because I can see an Ecofiling.” And then Joe will have a reminder to go and make sure that Joe’s up-to-date with the fire escape policy, so you really make sure that everything is running efficiently; you don’t have to follow people up because it’s all done, automatically. Then, really the idea is that it streamlines and increases the productivity in the work place.

Alan: So, this is great for lawyers or for real estate agents or anybody that has to manage documents. If you are in an insurance company – let’s say in claim adjustments, you have everything that you need right there from anywhere in the world. You don’t have to call the home office and say, “Have you found this particular paper? Can you fax it to me?” or “Can you email me a copy?” I can go to that one spot and get everything I need.

James: And if you need something else added to it, you can either go ahead and add it yourself and then everyone gets notified that the change has been made or you can request Joe in Marketing to make that change for you. You just leave a little comment next to the file and then Joe will get that and can make the changes as required.

Alan: Well, what happens say, I upload a file and then I make changes to it and I upload a file, again. Have I lost the original file, because maybe there were thing in the original file that I deleted and now I want to get back?

James: Well, Stephen made a good point before; when he said that “We have made a few changes to this document and uploaded it. All of the changes on all of the different versions are actually listed on Ecofiling.” And then as Stephen said, “You know what, this is getting off the topic. Let’s go back to where we were last Tuesday, which was version 14 or something and then we can just go straight back there and we have the original version 14 document there, right at our fingertips.”

Alan: How different is this from just having an FTP site, because a lot of businesses have an FTP site and they can put their files up there and organize them in subdirectories or folders. How different is Ecofiling from FTP?

Stephen: Ecofiling is the location where you can check files out; you could have information for information for all the users – an extension of your corporate Internet. An FTP site is very much like say, a backup site like Mozy or Carbonite. You put you files up there and yes, you can organize them, but you don’t know who is checking them out; you don’t have the same version control.

One of the issues with FTP is that some people don’t know how to use it and you have more training; it’s not as flexible; there’s no tracking. Your FTP just becomes another backup site, with no controls on it.

Alan: It’s like you don’t have any search capabilities, because of FTP you are looking at files only. Now you want to see what’s in the document; what type of document it is; who actually wrote the document; who checked it out last time. You need these complex search features, don’t you?

James: FTP is basically just a place where people can put files. You can’t really do too much with it. It doesn’t help you become more productive and it doesn’t make you business more efficient. What we have done with Ecofiling is turn the concept of FTP where you can have a repository of files and then actually made it useful so people can actually do something with it – and they actually want to use it. I’m no ludite, but I can’t use FTP, without having a technical person with me.

What I can do with Ecofiling on the other hand, is have files that I want to send to let’s say, London and all I have to do is type in an email address and hit “share”. And sure, you can do that with FTP, but you can’t really do a whole lot more. The fact that I can send a file to London with two clicks and the person in London receives an email that is in my full company branding, I think is pretty important.

If you go back to the search that we were talking about – basically what we need to do is to make sure that we can find things in a matter of seconds, so using key words and terms and descriptions and so on, we can find exactly the file that we need in just a matter of seconds. If that was stored, for instance on a C: drive or deep, dark corners of the company’s server, it would take forever to find that. It could take up to 20 minutes to find the right file, depending on how they are organized.

If you are looking for logos under the company folder “corporate branding” and it’s actually stored under “style” that’s a very difficult procedure to have to follow. But with Ecofiling, you just type in “company logo” and it comes straight up. So, the search really saves a lot of time and if you are paying someone by the hour for their work, then you’re saving a lot of money, simply by allowing them to look for things faster.

Alan: Yes, because I hear this all the time when somebody is at a presentation or out at a client’s and it’s like, “Well, I left that back at the office and I really don’t have anybody at the office that can send it to me because it’s after hours. I have to come back another day.” Well, here you just go to Ecofiling and you see all the documents the files that you want; everything is anywhere in the world.

Stephen: That’s right. You don’t have to carry an external drive in you pocket. You don’t have to carry an external drive in your pocket when you’re traveling across country to a meeting or to a conference. As long as you have Internet access, you can get to Ecofiling.

Alan: So many people, when they’re traveling they put all their contacts, all their important information on these little thumb drives and it’s amazing the statistics that the airport has on how many of these they find all the time or from taxi cabs, as a matter of fact. They are so small that they get lost and there is so much vital information. Here, all those good contacts could be accessed from any browser in the world.

James: It’s amazing how people look at a computer and say, “Oh, I paid $1,000 for that computer. The value to the company of the information that’s on the actual hard drive could be worth 10-20 times that. And it’s the same for the USB drives.

As companies become more aware of how much their data is actually worth they see services such as Ecofiling as a good investment, because they can access it from any where in the world, but because it’s secure nobody else can – which is not something you can say with a USB drive.

Alan: How do you make sure that our files, our documents are securely backed up? What kind of backup service do you use?

James: It’s all run on Amazon and Amazon uses a daily backup service. What happens then is it is a little bit like a Boeing 747, I suppose. It’s got a redundancy feature. So, if your files are on Server A and Server A is backed up to Server B, it’s not too bad if Server A fails, because then you’ve got Server B’s backup. And then they continue doing this storing information on multiple servers so there is 100% backup capability.

Alan: So this would have been great for people who went through the hurricanes or the tornadoes, because all their data, all their documents and everything else would be completely safe, online, offsite and they could move to any place in the world and start over again with just the flip of a button.

James: Yes, that’s right, Alan. But more importantly than that, I know it’s easy to look at the end of the world scenario such as the hurricane; but in reality it happens a lot more easily than that. Someone may drop their laptop and then don’t have that hard drive available to them or the computer gets stolen or it gets wiped.

So it’s the little things like that that really affect businesses because they think they are covered. But at the end of the day, unfortunately, it could take them a few weeks to get up and running.

Alan: Stephen and I go way back and we can tell horror stories about the “Oops Factor” about anything and everything that happens to computers. Sometimes I wonder why they even work, sometimes.

Stephen: You know it a mystery, sometimes. As you know, I have several here and I often wonder what is happening, internally. It’s really quite comforting to know that if I’m at somebody else’ office, I still have access to these very important files that I might need.

Alan: And we talked about a lot of the benefits that large companies, especially with multiple offices receive by using Ecofiling; but what about a small company or home office? What kind of benefits do they get?

James: Ecofiling begins its main benefits for companies as small as 3 users and then it works up from there. Typically, companies with fewer than 10 users use the old mentality of “Let’s just put everything on the C: drive and we will worry about that later.” Now, while that may seem like a good short-term solution, it’s actually probably costing them a lot of money in wasted time – not to mention the old backup problems if the C: drive gets corrupted. But, with Ecofiling if you start from scratch and you begin using it immediately, then everything sort of falls into place.
Alan: James, how did you come up with the idea of Ecofiling? I know it’s something we well need, but how did you come up with that idea?

James: Well, Ecofiling was developed using the old term of “scratching our itch.” Because our parent company has offices all around the county and the people need to be able to find and get the right files immediately, without having to make phone calls there was nothing available at a reasonable price.

So, we invested some time and effort into developing a concept and then we thought, “Well, hang on a minute. This is pretty good. We could actually spread this out to the rest of the world, because there are thousands of other companies around the world who have the same sort of needs.”

Alan: What I see Ecofiling doing is actually an extension of the office concept, because you don’t need all these filing people to file things in drawers; you don’t need to retrieval to find, “Where is this; who has it, because now it’s been checked out by Frank or Ralph.” Everything is one place and it’s already organized, whether you like it to be organized or not.

James: That’s right. Alan, Ecofiling has actually got three main benefits that I depend on quite regularly. The first one is the collaboration – so you and I can work on a document together on the other side of the world, even.

The second one is the filing, which is very important. And as you just said – things are naturally sorted so you don’t actually have to spend a lot time in actually go to file things.

And third, it allows you to send files anywhere in the world to customers or clients. So, with those three big benefits you can save a lot of time and as the old saying goes, “Time is money.”

Alan: But, what is the capacity of this system? Because a lot of times we sign up for some kind of online manager and we find out very quickly that someone in the office has exceeded the amount of space that we can have and every body else cannot upload any thing, anymore?

James: Yes, that’s a common problem with the smaller backup systems, isn’t it? With Ecofiling there’s really no limit to how much you can upload. If you need more space, we can give you more space. It’s really flexible and designed around the customer. While you do have a graphical representation of how much space you have left, it’s really not hard to add a bit more space if you need it.

Alan: Well, how do we get started with Ecofiling?

James: It’s virtually a one-minute process. You just need to go to http://www.cofiling.com and hit the “get started” button on the site and then fill in a little bit of detail and basically, you are straight into your account and up and running.

Alan: Well, James and Stephen, we are out of time and there are so many more features that are included in the Ecofiling online system that we didn’t get a chance to talk about today. I look forward to continuing this conversation, talking about those features, next time.

James: Thank you so much for having us on, Alan.