"How a Web-Based Filing Cabinet Can Enhance Your Business"

Complete Transcript of
James MacKay - Stephen Lawton - Ecofiling Interview
On Let's Talk Computers
Host Alan Ashendorf
June 20 2009

 

Alan: If you run a business, you know about paperwork. You have documents; you have brochures; you have company literature; you have contracts. And that's just the paperwork.

But, you also have all these electronic documents. You have spreadsheets; you have databases. And the list just goes on and on. What would it mean for your business if you didn't have to worry about paperwork anymore and could just concentrate on your business?

Our guests today are James MacKay, President of Ecofiling and Stephen Lawton, Marketing Manager with Ecofiling. Welcome to Let's Talk Computers, Guys.

James: Thanks for having us, Alan.

Alan: It's the paperwork. All businesses hate paperwork. I mean, it's the constant filing of the paperwork and even worse - it's trying to find the paperwork after you have filed it and that could be a nightmare for most businesses, can't it?

James: It really is. It's funny you should mention that because that's how Ecofiling began. It was started because our parent company has offices all around the country. Getting the paperwork to the appropriate person was always troublesome. If they were looking for logos or training documents, they would have to ring up the head office and say, "Do you have a copy of this training document? I've got this one, but it's from 2003."

We realized there was a need to make it easier to actually keep on top of documents, to make sure they've got the latest file versions and also to allow them to do remote access work over the Internet. That's how Ecofiling came about.

Alan: We are supposed to be living in a "paperless office" and what I've seen about a paperless office, I wish I would have taken stock out in paper, because we mounds and mounds of paper filed away in a drawer, somewhere. And if we have multiple offices it makes it even worse, because who has the latest set of documentation?

James: That's right and if you get all it or if you need to find something for a case that has come up previously, how do you find a document that has been put in a storage cabinet 5 or 6 years ago?

That's a job that you would be looking at two weeks, just to find a single document. If it's electronic, you can basically search it with key words or tags within a matter of minutes or even seconds, sometimes. Going online is certainly going to reduce your paper load.

Alan: Your parent company is Manaccom. You actually use Ecofiling for them, don't you?

James: We originally developed Ecofiling for Manaccom. There are probably seven or eight thousand documents and files on the Manaccom account now and there are probably about 100 staff members using it. It gets used every day, consistently. It has really changed the way that the company operates in the office.

Alan: We have services that are online - Google has come out with their Google Apps, where we can put all our documents online. But, that really doesn't give an office what they really need to have, which is this collaboration between users to find these documents.

James: Yes, that's right. It's the case around the round the world that companies and businesses of all sizes basically continue to print documents, even though they don't really need to. With Google Docs you can go online and have a word processor and so on, but with Ecofiling, what you can actually do is collaborate from anywhere in the world over the Internet.

So, if we wanted to do a marketing document, for instance, Stephen could do a draft; put it up on Ecofiling; I could it edit it and make a comment or two and then send him a message; put a new version back up and then everyone can continue collaborating on this document until it's 100% right. We all know that we've got the latest version. It really takes it that next step.

Alan: But, when you are talking about putting something up there in "the clouds," because that's what you are talking about. You have to look at security; you have to look at, "How safe are my documents?" - because the data, the documents, the papers - all of this is what makes a business, "a business."

James: Security is important, Alan. I look at clients of ours – lawyers and medical facilities, medical consults, and so on – and these guys are putting up some pretty confidential data and in fact, most companies have confidential data that they are putting on Ecofiling. We realized in the development that it was very important to have it all secure.

We couldn't just expect people to put it up on the Internet and say, "Oh, your documents are on the Internet; but don't worry, they will be safe." So, what we have had to do is utilize the same sort of technology for security that is used for Internet Banking.

It has got all the encryption and it's checked daily and it's backed up regularly. The actually physical data warehouse where it stored is run by Amazon and Amazon has very intricate security systems, both electronic and physical. We are very confident that the security on the document on Ecofiling is second-to-none.

Alan: Well, Stephen, you and I talk about "backups " - to back up online to backup on the network. This is not really a backup system, per se, is it?

Stephen: No, it's not. You take a look at some of the traditional online backup applications - you are taking files from your computer and you're putting and restoring them, elsewhere. You are not able to manage the files. You're not able to go in and change them off that server or collaborate with somebody else. It's just putting them into a box and that box happens to be some other online service.

The difference here is that I'm in the US, James is in Australia and I can work with him with documents as if we are sitting next to each other. So, it is very easy to manage your documents; to check out a file so that if I'm working on it, James knows that he can't make any changes at that moment. When I put it back up and the document is checked in again - at that point somebody can check it out.

You don't have the issues involved in losing control. It's traditional project management, really. You have control over where the project is all along the way. You know who's doing what. You have version control backwards, so if I make a change and James says, "You know I liked that version that we did a week ago." We can go back and get that. It's not at all like the online backup.

Alan: It has to be simple; it has to be at first fool proof; it has to be secure, but it must be simple because you're talking the average office worker who's working with this. You are not talking about the CEOs and Presidents who are the only ones that access this. You are talking about the average computer user being able to access this.

The first thing you see when you go online with Ecofiling is their dashboard. And the way it is set up is that you can instantly see what is going on.

Stephen: Remember that a lot of the CEOs and Presidents are probably less technical than some of the staffers that are working for them. These are people who are business people; they are not technologists. You want a dashboard that is very clear, very easy to use, and very intuitive and the last thing you want to do is worry about training all the staff that will be using the product. That could become a nightmare!

James: Alan, one of the important things when we were developing Ecofiling was that we needed to make sure that the company that installs would actually use it. Some software never actually gets used because it is too difficult.

What we did was make the learning curve as short as possible. So, some one could just sit down in front of the Ecofiling Dashboard and get to using it within just a couple of minutes. So, they don't have to go and try to figure out what things are. It should all be intuitive to them. And then there are "show me how" videos that they can watch if they if they don't understand a concept.

And to top it all off, I used my mother for "ease-of-use testing" because as far as I'm concerned unless she can use it, it's not easy enough to use. She's a typical computer user. She's not an expert; she just wants things to work. Whenever we have a new product I get her to sit down and make sure that it's all 100% to her liking.

Alan: But, it also has to be customizable, because when you have employees in branch offices logging-in it has to reflect the company's logo. It has to reflect their colors. It can't just be a bare bones, one-size fits all, can it?

Stephen: Well, really "one-size" fits none. With Ecofiling, you have the ability to not only have your corporate colors and corporate logo, so if a customer sees it they are seeing as an extension of the company; but you can also add news feeds, information that corporate users will need to know and that could be rotating information; it could be information that changes on a regular basis.

It really is an extension of a corporate intranet. It is another way of accessing the data, being able to work internally even if "internally" means one person is in one part of the country and somebody is in another part. You are all basically sitting at the same desk, that way.

Alan: Each user that is going to be logging in may not have the same access rights as say, the CEO or the President of the company. How can we restrict certain parts of the Ecofiling system to say, just certain people?

James: The Company would choose someone to be the administrator of Ecofiling, for us it is our corporate services manager, and all she has to do is make a new user. So, for instance Stephen can have the access rights to "read only" and to download files; he's not allowed to change files. This would obviously be good for someone in a retailing company and they have store workers who just need to download the company policies.

The other thing that an administrator can do is actually allocate their user to groups and then make the whole group read only. Actually, I might allow this group to download and I might allow them to make comments. So, they can pretty much allocate the permission rights that they wish each person to have.

Alan: Well, what are we looking at as far as the cost because on so many other services the cost gets to be almost astronomical as we grow?

Stephen: One of the differences between Ecofiling and some of the very large corporate types of project management offerings out there - we've talked a little bit about training. Some of those large programs have a lot of bells and whistles. They have capabilities that you probably have in other applications such as calendaring. And they have costs that match that, because every time you're adding bells and whistles, you are adding cost.

There is one offering out there for example that is $30 per month per user, which, for a small company that is out of the ballpark.

With Ecofiling it's very easy to budge what your costs are going to be; because if you have 3 users or if you have 30 users, you are looking at $3 per person with 1 gigabyte of workspace, per month. So, you know what you've got; you know what your needs are.

There is a very popular commercial offering from Cisco where the price changes when you change a number of users. Let's take a round number of 100 users. It is still costing you more than $6 per person and it's still (providing) only 20 gigabytes total for all 100 users.

It becomes a real issue with some of these other commercial products as to "How much space do we need? How much are we going to be spending? I've just added 5 new users and is that going to change my pricing?" With Ecofiling it's really simple. You know how many users you have - $3 a month per user. Figure 1 gigabyte per user. That's the space you've got to work with.

Let's say you want to upload some corporate videos and those video files are going to take an additional 5 gigabytes of space. The worst thing you want to do is all of a sudden go to the CFO and say, "You know what? I'm adding 3 more users. It's going to put me in another category altogether and I need more money." That's just not an acceptable way of budgeting and doing business.

With Ecofiling, if you need an additional 5 gigabtytes, you add 5 users at $3 a month; you know what it's going to cost you and you can budget that. The Chief Financial Officer will love this because that person will be able to put it into the budget - it's a "known expense."

Alan: If somebody would like to find more information about Ecofiling where would they go?

James: http://www.ecofiling.com

Alan: Well, James and Stephen, we've run out of time. Today we just touched on what Ecofiling is and I look forward to continuing this conversation when we will really take an in-depth look at many of the features that make Ecofiling so very different than all the other online office managers, next time.

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

Stephen: Thanks so much, Alan. It's always a pleasure to be with you.